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Exploration of confined spaces, such as pipelines and ducts, remains challenging for conventional rigid robots due to limited space, irregular geometry, and restricted access. Inspired by caterpillar locomotion and sensing, this paper…
Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…
In this work, we develop an approach for guiding robots to automatically localize and find the shapes of tumors and other stiff inclusions present in the anatomy. Our approach uses Gaussian processes to model the stiffness distribution and…
Inflated-beam soft robots, such as tip-everting vine robots, can control curvature by contracting one beam side via pneumatic actuation. This work develops a general finite element modeling approach to characterize their bending. The model…
Vine robots extend their tubular bodies by everting material from the tip, enabling navigation in complex environments with a minimalist soft body. Despite their promise for field applications, especially in the urban search and rescue…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
Inflatable structures used in soft robotics applications exhibit unique characteristics. In particular, the tip-extension structure, which grows from the tip, can grow without friction against the environment. However, these inflatable…
Vine robots are a class of soft continuum robots that grow via tip eversion, allowing them to move their tip without relying on reaction forces from the environment. Constructed from compliant materials such as fabric and thin, flexible…
Variable impedance control is advantageous for physical human-robot interaction to improve safety, adaptability and many other aspects. This paper presents a gain-scheduled variable stiffness control approach under strict frequency-domain…
Rapid acceleration and burst maneuvers in underwater robots depend less on maintaining precise resonance and more on force--velocity phase alignment during thrust generation. In this work, we investigate constrained-layer damping (CLD) as a…
Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However,…
Bipedal locomotion is a key challenge in robotics, particularly for robots like Bolt, which have a point-foot design. This study explores the control of such underactuated robots using constrained reinforcement learning, addressing their…
Future robots will navigate perilous, remote environments with resilience and autonomy. Researchers have proposed building robots with compliant bodies to enhance robustness, but this approach often sacrifices the autonomous capabilities…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
As an essential part of structure from motion (SfM) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems, motion averaging has been extensively studied in the past years and continues to attract surging research attention. While…
This study focuses on the locomotion capability improvement in a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot through an online adaptive learning approach. Leveraging the inverse kinematics model of the soft quadruped robot, we employ a central…
To address the issues that arise due to the manual navigation of guidewires in endovascular interventions, research in medical robotics has taken a strong interest in developing robotically steerable guidewires, which offer the possibility…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid struts and elastic tendons, provide impact resistance, low mass, and adaptability to unstructured terrain. Their compliance and complex, coupled dynamics, however, present modeling and control…
This paper presents design and control innovations of wearable robots that tackle two barriers to widespread adoption of powered exoskeletons, namely restriction of human movement and versatile control of wearable co-robot systems. First,…
State estimation is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. For soft continuum robots, this task is particularly challenging because their states (poses, strains, internal wrenches, and velocities) are inherently infinite-dimensional…