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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…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
This paper introduces a way to systematically investigate the effect of compliant prismatic spines in quadrupedal robot locomotion. We develop a novel spring-loaded lockable spine module, together with a new Spinal Compliance-Integrated…
Endoscopic endonasal approaches (EEA) have become more prevalent for minimally invasive skull base and sinus surgeries. However, rigid scopes and tools significantly decrease the surgeon's ability to operate in tight anatomical spaces and…
Continuum robots suffer large deflections due to internal and external forces. Accurate modeling of their passive compliance is necessary for accurate environmental interaction, especially in scenarios where direct force sensing is not…
Guidance robots that can guide people and avoid various obstacles, could potentially be owned by more visually impaired people at a fairly low cost. Most of the previous guidance robots for the visually impaired ignored the human response…
Developing dynamic models for tendon-driven continuum robots is challenging due to their nonlinear, high-dimensional, and friction-dominated dynamics. This paper presents a comparative study of data-driven system identification methods,…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Legged robots have demonstrated remarkable agility on rigid, stationary ground, but their locomotion reliability remains limited in non-inertial environments, where the supporting ground moves, tilts, or accelerates. Such conditions arise…
In biomechanics and robotics, elasticity plays a crucial role in enhancing locomotion efficiency and stability. Traditional approaches in legged robots often employ series elastic actuators (SEA) with discrete rigid components, which, while…
Humanoid and legged robots interact with the environment through intermittent contacts, making accurate motion estimation fundamentally dependent on reasoning about contact dynamics. However, standard sensing pipelines-whether based on…
Robots have been critical instruments to space exploration by providing access to environments beyond human limitations. Jumping robot concepts are attractive solutions to negotiate complex terrain. However, among the engineering challenges…
Contact detection for continuum and soft robots has been limited in past works to statics or kinematics-based methods with assumed circular bending curvature or known bending profiles. In this paper, we adapt the generalized momentum…
Various pipes are extensively used in both industrial settings and daily life, but the pipe inspection especially those with narrow sizes are still very challenging with tremendous time and manufacturing consumed. Quadrupedal robots,…
We present an approach to overcoming challenges in dynamical dexterity for robots through tunable origami structures. Our work leverages a one-parameter family of flat sheet crease patterns that folds into origami bellows, whose axial…
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…
In this paper, a legless capsule robot (capsubot) comprised of a sealed external body, an internal body, and a rotational actuator is proposed. The aim of this robot is to move in a two-dimensional viscous environment. After the robot is…
The work presented here is a novel biological approach for the compliant control of a robotic arm in real time (RT). We integrate a spiking cerebellar network at the core of a feedback control loop performing torque-driven control. The…
This paper presents a novel methodology to model and optimize trajectories of a quadrupedal robot with spinal compliance to improve standing jump performance compared to quadrupeds with a rigid spine. We introduce an elastic model for a…
Faced with strong demand for robots working in underwater pipeline environments, a novel underwater multi-model locomotion robot is designed and studied in this research. By mimicking the earthworm's metameric body, the robot is segmented…