Related papers: MoonBot: Modular and On-Demand Reconfigurable Robo…
An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations…
Future crewed missions to the Moon will face significant environmental and operational challenges, posing risks to the safety and performance of astronauts navigating its inhospitable surface. Whilst head-up displays (HUDs) have proven…
This thesis enhances the autonomy of the M4 (Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot) robot, designed for Mars and rescue missions. The research enables the robot to autonomously select its locomotion mode and path in complex terrains. Focusing on…
Future infrastructure construction on the lunar surface will require semi- or fully-autonomous operation from robots deployed at the build site. In particular, tasks such as electrical outfitting necessitate transport, routing, and fine…
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…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Validation of robotics theory on real-world hardware platforms is important to prove the practical feasibility of algorithms. This paper discusses some of the lessons learned while adapting the EvoBot, a low-cost robotics platform that we…
Modular and reconfigurable robotic systems have been designed to provide a customized solution for the non-repetitive tasks to be performed in a constrained environment. Customized solutions are normally extracted from task-based…
Future astronauts living and working on the Moon will face extreme environmental conditions impeding their operational safety and performance. While it has been suggested that Augmented Reality (AR) Head-Up Displays (HUDs) could potentially…
In recent years, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is developing rapidly and has been widely used in robotics research because of its flexible, open source, and extensive advantages. In scientific research, the corresponding hardware…
Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
We present a simulation framework for lunar construction work involving multiple autonomous machines. The framework supports modelling of construction scenarios and autonomy solutions, execution of the scenarios in simulation, and analysis…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Modular small-scale robots offer the potential for on-demand assembly and disassembly, enabling task-specific adaptation in dynamic and constrained environments. However, existing modular magnetic platforms often depend on workspace…
With the real need of field exploration in large-scale and extreme outdoor environments, cooperative exploration tasks have garnered increasing attention. This paper presents a comprehensive review of multi-robot cooperative exploration…
Lunar caves are promising features for long-term and permanent human presence on the moon. However, given their inaccessibility to imaging from survey satellites, the concrete environment within the underground cavities is not well known.…
Lunar exploration has become a key focus, driving scientific and technological advances. Ongoing missions are deploying rovers to the surface of the Moon, targeting the far side and south pole. However, these terrains pose challenges,…
Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…
The paper presents a new formal way of modeling and designing reconfigurable robots, in which case the robots are allowed to reconfigure not only structurally but also functionally. We call such kind of robots "self-evolvable", which have…