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There are many spaces inaccessible to humans where robots could help deliver sensors and equipment. Many of these spaces contain three-dimensional passageways and uneven terrain that pose challenges for robot design and control. Everting…

Pneumatically operated soft growing robots that extend via tip eversion are well-suited for navigation in confined spaces. Adding the ability to interact with the environment using sensors and tools attached to the robot tip would greatly…

Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…

Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…

Continuum robots are well suited for constrained environments but suffer from low distal stiffness, resulting in large posture errors under external loads. In this paper, we propose a novel structural primitive, the Distal-Stable Beam,…

Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…

Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents a new design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs,…

Enabling reaching capabilities in highly redundant continuum robot arms is an active area of research. Existing solutions comprise of task-space controllers, whose proper functioning is still limited to laboratory environments. In contrast,…

Cable-driven continuum robots offer high flexibility and lightweight design, making them well-suited for tasks in constrained and unstructured environments. However, prolonged use can induce mechanical fatigue from plastic deformation and…

General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…

Shape sensing of medical continuum robots is important both for closed-loop control as well as for enabling the clinician to visualize the robot inside the body. There is a need for inexpensive, but accurate shape sensing technologies. This…

Micro-scale continuum robots face significant limitations in achieving three-dimensional contact force perception, primarily due to structural miniaturization, nonlinear mechanical, and sensor integration. To overcome these limitations,…

Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…

Follow-the-leader (FTL) motion is essential for continuum robots operating in fragile and confined environments. It allows the robot to exert minimal force on its surroundings, reducing the risk of damage. This paper presents a novel design…

Continuum robots are typically slender and flexible with infinite freedoms in theory, which poses a challenge for their control and application. The shape sensing of continuum robots is vital to realise accuracy control. This letter…

Continuum robots are becoming increasingly popular for applications which require the robots to deform and change shape, while also being compliant. A cable-driven continuum robot is one of the most commonly used type. Typical cable driven…

Navigation and inspection in confined environments, such as tunnels and pipes, pose significant challenges for existing robots due to limitations in maneuverability and adaptability to varying geometries. Vine robots, which are soft growing…

Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…

Continuum robots have been widely adopted in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) because of their compact size and high flexibility. However, their proprioceptive capabilities remain limited, particularly in narrow lumens,…

Protecting and restoring forest ecosystems has become an important conservation issue. Although various robots have been used for field data collection to protect forest ecosystems, the complex terrain and dense canopy make the data…