Related papers: An Open-Source, Reproducible Tensegrity Robot that…
Isoperimetric robotic trusses can adapt to different tasks and environments because they have a high strength-to-weight ratio, can change their own shape dramatically, and can be reconfigured into a variety of different shapes. However,…
Autonomous navigation is essential for steel bridge inspection robot to monitor and maintain the working condition of steel bridges. Majority of existing robotic solutions requires human support to navigate the robot doing the inspection.…
With a slender redundant body, the tendon-driven robot (TDR) has a large workspace and great maneuverability while working in complex environments. TDR comprises multiple independently controlled robot segments, each with a set of driving…
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…
Many-legged elongated robots show promise for reliable mobility on rugged landscapes. However, most studies on these systems focus on planar motion planning without addressing rapid vertical motion. Despite their success on mild rugged…
Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs) pose significant modeling and control challenges due to complex nonlinearities, such as frictional hysteresis and transmission compliance. This paper proposes a differentiable learning framework that…
Consider a robot operating in an uncertain environment with stochastic, dynamic obstacles. Despite the clear benefits for trajectory optimization, it is often hard to keep track of each obstacle at every time step due to sensing and…
This paper presents an online path planning algorithm for safe autonomous manipulation of a flexibly constrained object in an unknown environment. Methods for real time identification and characterization of perceived flexible constraints…
Efficient navigation in dynamic environments is crucial for autonomous robots interacting with moving agents and static obstacles. We present a novel deep reinforcement learning approach that improves robot navigation and interaction with…
We propose a method to maintain high resource in a networked heterogeneous multi-robot system to resource failures. In our model, resources such as and computation are available on robots. The robots engaged in a joint task using these…
Piping inspection robots play an essential role for industries as they can reduce human effort and pose a lesser risk to their lives. Generally, the locomotion techniques of these robots can be classified into mechanical and bioinspired. By…
Programming physical intelligence into mechanisms holds great promise for machines that can accomplish tasks such as navigation of unstructured environments while utilizing a minimal amount of computational resources and electronic…
Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…
As drones and autonomous cars become more widespread it is becoming increasingly important that robots can operate safely under realistic conditions. The noisy information fed into real systems means that robots must use estimates of the…
Mobile robots are ubiquitous. Such vehicles benefit from well-designed and calibrated control algorithms ensuring their task execution under precise uncertainty bounds. Yet, in tasks involving humans in the loop, such as elderly or mobility…
In autonomous navigation, trajectory replanning, refinement, and control command generation are essential for effective motion planning. This paper presents a resilient approach to trajectory replanning addressing scenarios where the…
Deep reinforcement learning has great potential to acquire complex, adaptive behaviors for autonomous agents automatically. However, the underlying neural network polices have not been widely deployed in real-world applications, especially…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
Purpose: Six million people use crutches as mobile aids in the US. Rigid designs with no axial mobility limit sensory feedback and lead to secondary injury on the upper joints. Spring-loaded designs offer compliance but may compromise…
Bipedal robots have advantages in maneuvering human-centered environments, but face greater failure risk compared to other stable mobile platforms such as wheeled or quadrupedal robots. While learning-based traversability has been widely…