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A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
Stable locomotion in precipitous environments is an essential task for quadruped robots, requiring the ability to resist various external disturbances. Recent neural policies enhance robustness against disturbances by learning to resist…
The paper focuses on the enhanced stiffness modeling of robotic manipulators by taking into account influence of the external force/torque acting upon the end point. It implements the virtual joint technique that describes the compliance of…
Recently, researchers have explored control methods that embrace nonlinear dynamic coupling instead of suppressing it. Such designs leverage dynamical coupling for communication between different parts of the robot. Morphological…
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…
Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
A hybrid continuum robot design is introduced that combines a proximal tendon-actuated section with a distal telescoping section comprised of permanent-magnet spheres actuated using an external magnet. While, individually, each section can…
Reconfigurable robots are at the forefront of robotics innovation due to their unmatched versatility and adaptability in addressing various tasks through collaborative operations. This paper explores the design and implementation of a novel…
Learning-based approaches have recently shown notable success in legged locomotion. However, these approaches often lack accountability, necessitating empirical tests to determine their effectiveness. In this work, we are interested in…
In this paper, we present a novel rolling, jumping robot. The robot consists of a driven pendulum mounted to a wheel in a compact, lightweight, 3D printed design. We show that by driving the pendulum to shift the robot's weight…
Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
We study two mechanisms of locomotion of a body in an inviscid fluid, which take place without the shedding of vorticity; we consider two simple examples of robots which are able to move along a straight trajectory. The first one consists…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
The nonlinear mechanics of a flexible elastic rod constrained at its edges by a pair of sliding sleeves is analyzed. The planar equilibrium configurations of this variable-length elastica are found to have shape defined only by the…
Systems consisting of spheres rolling on elastic membranes have been used to introduce a core conceptual idea of General Relativity (GR): how curvature guides the movement of matter. However, such schemes cannot accurately represent…
Continuum robots (CR) offer excellent dexterity and compliance in contrast to rigid-link robots, making them suitable for navigating through, and interacting with, confined environments. However, the study of path planning for CRs while…