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Conventional navigation pipelines for legged robots remain largely geometry-centric, relying on dense SLAM representations that are fragile under rapid motion and offer limited support for semantic decision making in open-world exploration.…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
Recent advancements in constrained kinematic control make it an attractive strategy for controlling robots with arbitrary geometry in challenging tasks. Most current works assume that the robot kinematic model is precise enough for the task…
Leak detection and water quality monitoring are requirements and challenging tasks in Water Distribution Systems (WDS). In-line robots are designed for this aim. In our previous work, we designed an in-pipe robot [1]. In this research, we…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance…
Tip-extending soft robots that "grow" via pneumatic eversion of their body material have demonstrated applications in exploration of cluttered environments. During growth, the motion and force of the robot tip can be controlled in three…
This paper introduces a Cosserat rod based mathematical model for modeling a self-controllable variable curvature soft continuum robot. This soft continuum robot has a hollow inner channel and was developed with the ability to perform…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…
Rehabilitation of aging pipes requires accurate condition assessment and mapping far into the pipe interiors. Soft growing vine robot systems are particularly promising for navigating confined, sinuous paths such as in pipes, but are…
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…
There is a surge of research interest in the field of tensegrity robotics. Robots developed under this paradigm provide many advantages and have distinguishing features in terms of structural compliance, dexterity, safety, and weight…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
Inflated continuum robots are promising for a variety of navigation tasks, but controlling their motion with a small number of actuators is challenging. These inflated beam robots tend to buckle under compressive loads, producing extremely…
In lunar and planetary exploration, legged robots have attracted significant attention as an alternative to conventional wheeled robots, which struggle to traverse rough and uneven terrain. To enable locomotion over highly irregular and…
Arboreal environments challenge current robots but are deftly traversed by many familiar animal locomotors such as squirrels. We present a small, 450 g robot "Pinto" developed for tree-jumping, a behavior seen in squirrels but rarely in…
The continuum robot has attracted more attention for its flexibility. Continuum robot kinematics models are the basis for further perception, planning, and control. The design and research of continuum robots are usually based on the…
Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs) have the potential to be used in minimally invasive surgery and industrial inspection, where the robot must enter narrow and confined spaces. We propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach to…