Related papers: PuffyBot: An Untethered Shape Morphing Robot for M…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Untethered soft robots are essential for advancing the real-world deployment of soft robotic systems in diverse and multitasking environments. Inspired by soft-bodied inchworm, we present a fully untethered soft robot with a curved,…
The ability to modify morphology in response to environmental changes represents a highly advantageous feature in biological organisms, facilitating their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. While some robots have the capability…
Faced with strong demand for robots working in underwater pipeline environments, a novel underwater multi-model locomotion robot is designed and studied in this research. By mimicking the earthworm's metameric body, the robot is segmented…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
Robots designed for therapy and social interaction aim to evoke a sense of animacy in humans. While many studies have focused on life like appearance or joint based movements, the effect of whole body volume changing movements commonly…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…
It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely…
This paper presents AquaMILR+, an untethered limbless robot designed for agile navigation in complex aquatic environments. The robot features a bilateral actuation mechanism that models musculoskeletal actuation in many anguilliform…
Achieving both agile maneuverability and high energy efficiency in aerial robots, particularly in dynamic wind environments, remains challenging. Conventional thruster-powered systems offer agility but suffer from high energy consumption,…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Multimodal locomotion is crucial for an animal's adaptability in unstructured wild environments. Similarly, in the human gastrointestinal tract, characterized by viscoelastic mucus, complex rugae, and narrow sphincters like the cardia,…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
This paper presents the first steps toward a soft dolphin robot using a bio-inspired approach to mimic dolphin flexibility. The current dolphin robot uses a minimalist approach, with only two actuated cable-driven degrees of freedom…