Related papers: AMBER: A tether-deployable gripping crawler with c…
Soft compliant microrobots have the potential to deliver significant societal impact when deployed in applications such as search and rescue. In this research we present mCLARI, a body compliant quadrupedal microrobot of 20mm neutral body…
Limited flight range is a common problem for multicopters. To alleviate this problem, we propose a method for finding the optimal speed and heading of a multicopter when flying a given path to achieve the longest flight range. Based on a…
Robotic navigation in dense, cluttered environments such as agricultural canopies presents significant challenges due to physical and visual occlusion caused by leaves and branches. Traditional vision-based or model-dependent approaches…
While most micro-robots face difficulty traveling on rugged and uneven terrain, beetles can walk smoothly on the complex substrate without slipping or getting stuck on the surface due to their stiffness-variable tarsi and expandable hooks…
Our work aims to make significant strides in understanding unexplored locomotion control paradigms based on the integration of posture manipulation and thrust vectoring. These techniques are commonly seen in nature, such as Chukar birds…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
Assistive free-flying robots are a promising platform for supporting and working alongside astronauts in carrying out tasks that require interaction with the environment. However, current free-flying robot platforms are limited by existing…
Multi-suction-cup grippers are frequently employed to perform pick-and-place robotic tasks, especially in industrial settings where grasping a wide range of light to heavy objects in limited amounts of time is a common requirement. However,…
Robotic grasping is facing a variety of real-world uncertainties caused by non-static object states, unknown object properties, and cluttered object arrangements. The difficulty of grasping increases with the presence of more uncertainties,…
Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh…
Intelligent robotic disassembly of end-of-life (EOL) products has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. While machine learning techniques have shown promise, the lack of specialized hardware limits their application in real-world…
Granular grippers can manipulate a wide variety of objects, but need to be pressed on the object to conform to it. If the object is placed on unstable ground, e.g., on sand or water, this step might cause the object to sink or move away…
Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a simple yet novel method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other…
Fast, autonomous flight in unstructured, cluttered environments such as forests is challenging because it requires the robot to compute new plans in realtime on a computationally-constrained platform. In this paper, we enable this…
Grasping has long been considered an important and practical task in robotic manipulation. Yet achieving robust and efficient grasps of diverse objects is challenging, since it involves gripper design, perception, control and learning, etc.…
Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial physical interactions lies in handling uncertain contact…
This paper presents the concept of a tethered variable inertial attitude control mechanism for a modular jumping-limbed robot designed for planetary exploration in low-gravity environments. The system, named SPLITTER, comprises two sub-10…
In the context of legged robots, adaptive behavior involves adaptive balancing and adaptive swing foot reflection. While adaptive balancing counteracts perturbations to the robot, adaptive swing foot reflection helps the robot to navigate…
Successful aerial manipulation largely depends on how effectively a controller can tackle the coupling dynamic forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, this control problem has remained largely unsolved as the…
This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those used for machine learning, image segmentation and binary…