Related papers: On Steerability Factors for Growing Vine Robots
Robots are increasingly being deployed not only in workplaces but also in households. Effectively execute of manipulation tasks by robots relies on variable impedance control with contact forces. Furthermore, robots should possess adaptive…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive,…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interaction with uncertainty…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Agricultural robots have the potential to increase production yields and reduce costs by performing repetitive and time-consuming tasks. However, for robots to be effective, they must be able to navigate autonomously in fields or orchards…
The optimal stiffness for soft swimming robots depends on swimming speed, which means no single stiffness can maximise efficiency in all swimming conditions. Tunable stiffness would produce an increased range of high-efficiency swimming…
One major recurring challenge in deploying manipulation robots is determining the optimal placement of manipulators to maximize performance. This challenge is exacerbated in complex, cluttered agricultural environments of high-value crops,…
This paper improves visual-inertial systems to boost the localization accuracy for low-cost rescue robots. When robots traverse on rugged terrain, the performance of pose estimation suffers from big noise on the measurements of the inertial…
Aerobat is a bat-inspired flapping-wing robot with a wing gait generate by the computational structure, a planar linkage of carbon fiber links driven by a single motor. This design minimizes weight but couples both wings to a shared input…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…
Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…
Most engineered pilings require substantially more force to be driven into the ground than they can resist during extraction. This requires relatively heavy equipment for insertion, which is problematic for anchoring in hard-to-access…
Numerous wearable robots have been developed to meet the demands of physical assistance and entertainment. These wearable robots range from body-enhancing types that assist human arms and legs to body-extending types that have extra arms.…
The agricultural sector is rapidly evolving to meet growing global food demands, yet tasks like fruit and vegetable handling remain labor-intensive, causing inefficiencies and post-harvest losses. Automation, particularly selective…
Modern robots embody power and precision control. Yet, as robots undertake tasks that apply forces on humans, this power brings risk of injury. Soft robotic actuators use deformation to produce smooth, continuous motions and conform to…
In this paper we present a study of a specific class of vibration-driven robots: the brushbots. In a bottom-up fashion, we start by deriving dynamic models of the brushes and we discuss the conditions under which these models can be…
There is a dramatic shortage of skilled labor for modern vineyards. The Vinum project is developing a mobile robotic solution to autonomously navigate through vineyards for winter grapevine pruning. This necessitates an autonomous…
Robot navigation requires an autonomy pipeline that is robust to environmental changes and effective in varying conditions. Teach and Repeat (T&R) navigation has shown high performance in autonomous repeated tasks under challenging…