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Bipedal robots are a fascinating and advanced category of robots designed to mimic human form and locomotion. The development of the bipedal robots is a significant milestone in robotics. However, even the most advanced bipedal robots are…

Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…

In most macro-scale robotics systems , propulsion and controls are enabled through a physical tether or complex on-board electronics and batteries. A tether simplifies the design process but limits the range of motion of the robot, while…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…

It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training,…

Learning a locomotion policy for quadruped robots has traditionally been constrained to a specific robot morphology, mass, and size. The learning process must usually be repeated for every new robot, where hyperparameters and reward…

Jumping is an efficient locomotion strategy to traverse cluttered, uneven, or unstable environments in nature, yet replicating continuous, autonomous leaping in soft robots remains challenging due to limited energy storage and reliance on…

The vast majority of the ocean's volume remains unexplored, in part because of limitations on the vertical range and measurement duration of existing robotic platforms. In light of the accelerating rate of climate change impacts on the…

Shape transformation is crucial for the survival, adaptation, predation, defense, and reproduction of organisms in complex environments. It also serves as a key mechanism for the development of various applications, including soft robotics,…

Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…

Designing ground-aerial robots is challenging due to the increased actuation requirements which can lead to added weight and reduced locomotion efficiency. Morphobots mitigate this by combining actuators into multi-functional groups and…

While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…

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…

Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…

Electrostatic actuators provide a promising approach to creating soft robotic sheets, due to their flexible form factor, modular integration, and fast response speed. However, their control requires kilo-Volt signals and understanding of…

Underwater robots are widely deployed for ocean exploration and manipulation. Underactuated mechanisms are particularly advantageous in aquatic environments, as reducing actuator count lowers the risk of motor leakage while introducing…

Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…

Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…

We present the CyberDiver, an untethered robotic impactor capable of actively modulating the fluid physics during high-speed water entry. First, we utilize the CyberDiver to extend our understanding of the water entry of passively flexible…