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Wheeled robots have recently demonstrated superior mechanical capability to traverse vertically challenging terrain (e.g., extremely rugged boulders comparable in size to the vehicles themselves). Negotiating such terrain introduces…
Wheeled robots have gained significant attention due to their wide range of applications in manufacturing, logistics, and service industries. However, due to the difficulty of building a highly accurate dynamics model for wheeled robots,…
Energy efficiency and motion smoothness are essential in trajectory planning for high-degree-of-freedom robots to ensure optimal performance and reduce mechanical wear. This paper presents a novel framework integrating sinusoidal trajectory…
Payload transport over flat terrain via multi-wheel robot carriers is well-understood, highly effective, and configurable. In this paper, our goal is to provide similar effectiveness and configurability for transport over rough terrain that…
Inspection of infrastructure using static sensor nodes has become a well established approach in recent decades. In this work, we present an experimental setup to address a binary inspection task using mobile sensor nodes. The objective is…
Background The development of a simulation model of full body reaching tasks that can predict endeffector trajectories and joint excursions consistent with experimental data is a non-trivial task. Because of the kinematic redundancy…
Engineering design is traditionally performed by hand: an expert makes design proposals based on past experience, and these proposals are then tested for compliance with certain target specifications. Testing for compliance is performed…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Planetary rovers operating in extraterrestrial environments often encounter significant mobility challenges due to varying terrain features such as gradients and granularity. While recent works in multimodal wheel design have explored…
This paper proposes a real-time physically-based method for simulating vehicle deformation. Our system synthesizes vehicle deformation characteristics by considering a low-dimensional coupled vehicle body technique. We simulate the motion…
The aerodynamic optimization process of cars requires multiple iterations between aerodynamicists and stylists. Response Surface Modeling and Reduced-Order Modeling are commonly used to eliminate the overhead due to Computational Fluid…
This paper presents a method for optimal motion planning of continuum robots by employing Bernstein surfaces to approximate the system's dynamics and impose complex constraints, including collision avoidance. The main contribution is the…
We consider robust optimal experimental design (ROED) for nonlinear Bayesian inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). An optimal design is one that maximizes some utility quantifying the quality of the solution of…
We propose a novel holistic approach for safe autonomous exploration and map building based on constrained Bayesian optimisation. This method finds optimal continuous paths instead of discrete sensing locations that inherently satisfy…
Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) consist of multiple stations that perform material synthesis and characterisation tasks. To minimize station downtime and maximize experimental throughput, it is practical to run experiments in asynchronous…
This systems paper presents the implementation and design of RB5, a wheeled robot for autonomous long-term exploration with fewer and cheaper sensors. Requiring just an RGB-D camera and low-power computing hardware, the system consists of…
Accelerated discovery in materials science demands autonomous systems capable of dynamically formulating and solving design problems. In this work, we introduce a novel framework that leverages Bayesian optimization over a problem…
Co-design optimisation of autonomous systems has emerged as a powerful alternative to sequential approaches by jointly optimising physical design and control strategies. However, existing frameworks often neglect the robustness required for…
This paper presents a novel method for reformulating non-differentiable collision avoidance constraints into smooth nonlinear constraints using strong duality of convex optimization. We focus on a controlled object whose goal is to avoid…