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Utilizing robotic systems in the construction industry is gaining popularity due to their build time, precision, and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a system that allows the coordination of multiple manipulator robots for…
The potential diagnostic applications of magnet-actuated capsules have been greatly increased in recent years. For most of these potential applications, accurate position control of the capsule have been highly demanding. However, the…
Autonomous systems face the intricate challenge of navigating unpredictable environments and interacting with external objects. The successful integration of robotic agents into real-world situations hinges on their perception capabilities,…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
Multi-robot platforms are playing an increasingly important role in warehouse automation for efficient goods transport. This paper proposes a novel customization of a multi-robot system, called Tactile Mobile Manipulators (TacMMs). Each…
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…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
Robotic systems are more present in our society everyday. In human-robot environments, it is crucial that end-users may correctly understand their robotic team-partners, in order to collaboratively complete a task. To increase action…
Individualized manufacturing is becoming an important approach as a means to fulfill increasingly diverse and specific consumer requirements and expectations. While there are various solutions to the implementation of the manufacturing…
Granular materials are of critical interest to many robotic tasks in planetary science, construction, and manufacturing. However, the dynamics of granular materials are complex and often computationally very expensive to simulate. We…
Moving in dynamic pedestrian environments is one of the important requirements for autonomous mobile robots. We present a model-based reinforcement learning approach for robots to navigate through crowded environments. The navigation policy…
Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and…
The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…
Robotic manipulation involves actions where contacts occur between the robot and the objects. In this scope, the availability of physics-based engines allows motion planners to comprise dynamics between rigid bodies, which is necessary for…
Building general-purpose robots to perform a diverse range of tasks in a large variety of environments in the physical world at the human level is extremely challenging. It requires the robot learning to be sample-efficient, generalizable,…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
Stable dynamical systems are a flexible tool to plan robotic motions in real-time. In the robotic literature, dynamical system motions are typically planned without considering possible limitations in the robot's workspace. This work…
We introduce BenchBot, a novel software suite for benchmarking the performance of robotics research across both photorealistic 3D simulations and real robot platforms. BenchBot provides a simple interface to the sensorimotor capabilities of…