Related papers: Enabling Autonomous Navigation in a Snake Robot th…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
This work aims to develop a resource-efficient solution for obstacle-avoiding tracking control of a planar snake robot in a densely cluttered environment with obstacles. Particularly, Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) has been…
Autonomous aerial target tracking in unstructured and GPS-denied environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Many existing methods rely on motion capture systems, pre-mapped scenes, or feature-based localization to ensure…
Snake robots, comprised of sequentially connected joint actuators, have recently gained increasing attention in the industrial field, like life detection in narrow space. Such robots can navigate through the complex environment via the…
Soft robotic snakes (SRSs) have a unique combination of continuous and compliant properties that allow them to imitate the complex movements of biological snakes. Despite the previous attempts to develop SRSs, many have been limited to…
Subterranean burrowing is inherently difficult for robots because of the high forces experienced as well as the high amount of uncertainty in this domain. Because of the difficulty in modeling forces in granular media, we propose the use of…
Cyborg insects refer to hybrid robots that integrate living insects with miniature electronic controllers to enable robotic-like programmable control. These creatures exhibit advantages over conventional robots in adaption to complex…
Snake robots enable mobility through extreme terrains and confined environments in terrestrial and space applications. However, robust perception and localization for snake robots remain an open challenge due to the proximity of the sensor…
Autonomous aerial navigation in dense natural environments remains challenging due to limited visibility, thin and irregular obstacles, GNSS-denied operation, and frequent perceptual degradation. This work presents an improved deep…
Drone racing is becoming a popular sport where human pilots have to control their drones to fly at high speed through complex environments and pass a number of gates in a pre-defined sequence. In this paper, we develop an autonomous system…
Although ground robotic autonomy has gained widespread usage in structured and controlled environments, autonomy in unknown and off-road terrain remains a difficult problem. Extreme, off-road, and unstructured environments such as…
Sprawling locomotion in vertebrates, particularly salamanders, demonstrates how body undulation and spinal mobility enhance stability, maneuverability, and adaptability across complex terrains. While prior work has separately explored…
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…
Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a…
Snakes' bodies are covered in scales that make it easier to slide in some directions than in others. This frictional anisotropy allows for sliding locomotion with an undulatory gait, one of the most common for snakes. Isotropic friction is…
This paper employs a reinforcement learning-based model identification method aimed at enhancing the accuracy of the dynamics for our snake robot, called COBRA. Leveraging gradient information and iterative optimization, the proposed…
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robot autonomy. A major limitation, however, is that during exploration robots oftentimes have to rely on on-board systems alone for state estimation, accumulating significant drift over time in large…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
This paper presents a unified control framework for robust trajectory tracking and moving obstacle avoidance applicable to a broad class of mobile robots. By formulating a generalized kinematic transformation, we convert diverse vehicle…
Enabling fully autonomous robots capable of navigating and exploring large-scale, unknown and complex environments has been at the core of robotics research for several decades. A key requirement in autonomous exploration is building…