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Agile mapless navigation in cluttered 3D environments poses significant challenges for autonomous drones. Conventional mapping-planning-control pipelines incur high computational cost and propagate estimation errors. We present AERO-MPPI, a…
This paper introduces SCALER, a quadrupedal robot that demonstrates climbing on bouldering walls, overhangs, ceilings and trotting on the ground. SCALER is one of the first high-degrees of freedom four-limbed robots that can free-climb…
High-speed locomotion of animals gives them tremendous advantages in exploring, hunting, and escaping from predators in varying environments. Enlightened by the fast-running gait of mammals like cheetahs and wolves, we designed and…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
Navigating rugged terrain and steep slopes is a challenge for mobile robots. Conventional legged and wheeled systems struggle with these environments due to limited traction and stability. Northeastern University's COBRA (Crater Observing…
As humanoid robots enter real-world environments, ensuring robust locomotion across diverse environments is crucial. This paper presents a computationally efficient hierarchical control framework for humanoid robot locomotion based on…
Planning a time-optimal trajectory for aerial robots is critical in many drone applications, such as rescue missions and package delivery, which have been widely researched in recent years. However, it still involves several challenges,…
Mobile manipulators have the potential to revolutionize modern agriculture, logistics and manufacturing. In this work, we present the design of a ground-based mobile manipulator for automated structure assembly. The proposed system is…
This study presents an analysis of experimental data from Harpy, a thruster-assisted bipedal robot developed at Northeastern University. The study examines data sets from trotting and jumping experiments to understand the fundamental…
Limbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology, from cells to organisms. We develop and analyze a model for the dynamics of one-dimensional elastic crawlers, subject to active stress and deformation-dependent friction with the substrate. We…
Grasping is essential in robotic manipulation, yet challenging due to object and gripper diversity and real-world complexities. Traditional analytic approaches often have long optimization times, while data-driven methods struggle with…
This paper presents a novel trajectory planning method for aerial perching. Compared with the existing work, the terminal states and the trajectory durations can be adjusted adaptively, instead of being determined in advance. Furthermore,…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Grasping in dynamic environments presents a unique set of challenges. A stable and reachable grasp can become unreachable and unstable as the target object moves, motion planning needs to be adaptive and in real time, the delay in…
The development of robotic grippers and hands for automation aims to emulate human dexterity without sacrificing the efficiency of industrial grippers. This study introduces Rotograb, a tendon-actuated robotic hand featuring a novel…
We present a framework for dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain, where the choice of appropriate footholds is crucial for the success of the behaviour. We build a model of the environment on-line and on-board using an…
This paper discusses the design of a novel compliant in-pipe climbing modular robot for small diameter pipes. The robot consists of a kinematic chain of 3 OmniCrawler modules with a link connected in between 2 adjacent modules via compliant…
The gaits of undulating animals arise from a complex interaction of their central nervous system, muscle, connective tissue, bone, and environment. As a simplifying assumption, many previous studies have often assumed that sufficient…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Grasping a novel target object in constrained environments (e.g., walls, bins, and shelves) requires intensive reasoning about grasp pose reachability to avoid collisions with the surrounding structures. Typical 6-DoF robotic grasping…