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Wrist-driven orthotics have been designed to assist people with C6-7 spinal cord injury, however, the kinematic constraint imposed by such a control strategy can impede mobility and lead to abnormal body motion. This study characterizes…
Grasping is a fundamental skill in robotics with diverse applications across medical, industrial, and domestic domains. However, current approaches for predicting valid grasps are often tailored to specific grippers, limiting their…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…
Skateboarders perform a reciprocating motion on a curved ramp, called pumping, by moving their bodies up and down perpendicular to the ramp's surface. We propose a simple mechanical model for this pumping motion and solve the equation of…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
We study the geometry of the inextensible string (the whip) and its discrete approximation (the chain). In the absence of gravity, both motions represent geodesic motions on certain manifolds. We show how the motion of the chain converges…
Suction cups offer a useful gripping solution, particularly in industrial robotics and warehouse applications. Vision-based grasp algorithms, like Dex-Net, show promise but struggle to accurately perceive dark or reflective objects,…
Human kinematics is of fundamental importance for rehabilitation and assistive robotic systems that physically interact with human. The wrist plays an essential role for dexterous human-robot interaction, but its conventional kinematic…
We study experimentally a a three-dimensional reduced model of a sail shape performing pitching oscillations around a mean incidence angle ($\alpha_{m}$) with respect to an incoming flow in a hydrodynamic channel at a constant velocity…
The leaves of many plants are superhydrophobic, a property that may have evolved to clean the leaves by encouraging water droplets to bead up and roll off. Superhydrophobic surfaces can also exhibit reduced friction and liquids flowing over…
Hypothesis: Surrounding fluids affect critically drop wetting dynamics in many applications involving viscous environments. Although macroscopic effects of outer fluid viscosity on contact line motion have been documented, the extent to…
Swimming fish and flying insects use the flapping of fins and wings to generate thrust. In contrast, microscopic organisms typically deform their appendages in a wavelike fashion. Since a flapping motion with two degrees of freedom is able,…
Flapping wings are a bio-inspired method to produce lift and thrust in aerial robots, leading to quiet and efficient motion. The advantages of this technology are safety and maneuverability, and physical interaction with the environment,…
An optical kink is a shock-wave-like field structure which can appear in a resonant two-level medium as a result of the nonlinear process of self-steepening. We numerically simulate this process using an adiabatically switching waveform as…
Robotic grasping under uncertainty remains a fundamental challenge due to its uncertain and contact-rich nature. Traditional rigid robotic hands, with limited degrees of freedom and compliance, rely on complex model-based and heavy feedback…
This work presents algorithms for the feedback-stabilised walking of bipedal humanoid robotic platforms, along with the underlying theoretical and sensorimotor frameworks required to achieve it. Bipedal walking is inherently complex and…
Organisms that locomote by propagating waves of body bending can maintain performance across heterogeneous environments by modifying their gait frequency $\omega$ or wavenumber $k$. We identify a unifying relationship between these…
Wheeled bipedal robots (WBRs) have the capability to execute agile and versatile locomotion tasks. This paper focuses on improving the dynamic performance of WBRs through innovations in both hardware and software development. Inspired by…
We investigated the actuation performances of anisotropic gels driven by mechanical and chemical stimuli, in terms of both deformation processes and stroke--curves, and distinguished between the fast response of gels before diffusion starts…
A single flexible filament can be actuated to escape from the scallop theorem and generate net propulsion at low Reynolds number. In this work, we study the dynamics of a simple boundary-driven multi-filament swimmer, a two-arm clamshell…