Related papers: AMBER: A tether-deployable gripping crawler with c…
Climbing soft robots are of tremendous interest in both science and engineering due to their potential applications in intelligent surveillance, inspection, maintenance, and detection under environments away from the ground. The challenge…
Selective fruit harvesting is a challenging manipulation problem due to occlusions and clutter arising from plant foliage. A harvesting gripper should i) have a small cross-section, to avoid collisions while approaching the fruit; ii) have…
Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic…
Perching on {the surface} of moving objects, like vehicles, could extend the flight {time} and range of quadrotors. Suction cups are usually adopted for {surface attachment} due to their durability and large adhesive force. To seal on {a…
Rescue missions in mountain environments are hardly achievable by standard legged robots-because of the high slopes-or by flying robots-because of limited payload capacity. We present a concept for a rope-aided climbing robot which can…
Fruit harvesting remains predominantly a labor-intensive process, motivating the development of research for robotic grippers. Conventional rigid or vacuum-driven grippers require complex mechanical design or high energy consumption.…
In cluttered spaces, such as forests, drone picking up a payload via an abseil claw is an open challenge, as the cable is likely tangled and blocked by the branches and obstacles. To address such a challenge, in this work, a cooperative…
An automated prepreg fabric draping system is being developed which consists of an array of actuated grippers. It has the ability to pick up a fabric ply and place it onto a double-curved mold surface. A previous research effort based on a…
High-speed aerial grasping presents significant challenges due to the high demands on precise, responsive flight control and coordinated gripper manipulation. In this work, we propose Swooper, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based…
Motion planning for a multi-limbed climbing robot must consider the robot's posture, joint torques, and how it uses contact forces to interact with its environment. This paper focuses on motion planning for a robot that uses nontraditional…
Novel robotic grippers have captured increasing interests recently because of their abilities to adapt to varieties of circumstances and their powerful functionalities. Differing from traditional gripper with mechanical components-made…
In this paper, we propose a single-actuator gripper that can lift thin objects lying on a flat surface, in addition to the ability as a standard parallel gripper. The key is a crawler on the fingertip, which is underactuated together with…
Perching allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reduce energy consumption, remain anchored for surface sampling operations, or stably survey their surroundings. Previous efforts for perching on vertical surfaces have predominantly…
Underwater soft grippers exhibit potential for applications such as monitoring, research, and object retrieval. However, existing underwater gripping techniques frequently cause disturbances to ecosystems. In response to this challenge, we…
This paper presents a gait controller for bipedal robots to achieve highly agile walking over various terrains given local slope and friction cone information. Without these considerations, untimely impacts can cause a robot to trip and…
In real-world field operations, aerial grasping systems face significant challenges in dynamic environments due to strong winds, shifting surfaces, and the need to handle heavy loads. Particularly when dealing with heavy objects, the…
Deformable substrates such as sand and mud present significant challenges for terrestrial robots due to complex robot-terrain interactions. Inspired by mudskippers, amphibious animals that naturally adjust their tail morphology and movement…
Comparing robotic cloth-manipulation systems in a real-world setup is challenging. The fidelity gap between simulation-trained cloth neural controllers and real-world operation hinders the reliable deployment of these methods in physical…
Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…