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In field environments, numerous robots necessitate manual intervention for restoration of functionality post a turnover, resulting in diminished operational efficiency. This study presents an innovative design solution for a reversible…
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…
In this work, we provide a simulation framework to perform systematic studies on the effects of spinal joint compliance and actuation on bounding performance of a 16-DOF quadruped spined robot Stoch 2. Fast quadrupedal locomotion with…
Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world,…
Cosserat rod theory is the popular approach to modeling ferromagnetic soft robots as 1-Dimensional (1D) slender structures in most applications, such as biomedical. However, recent soft robots designed for locomotion and manipulation often…
In this paper, we introduce a design principle to develop novel soft modular robots based on tensegrity structures and inspired by the cytoskeleton of living cells. We describe a novel strategy to realize tensegrity structures using planar…
Legged robots need to be capable of walking on diverse terrain conditions. In this paper, we present a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning locomotion on non-rigid dynamic terrains. Specifically, our framework can generate…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
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…
Compensating for slip and skid is crucial for mobile robots navigating outdoor terrains. In these challenging environments, slipping and skidding introduce uncertainties into trajectory tracking systems, potentially compromising the safety…
Locomotion on granular slopes such as sand dunes remains a fundamental challenge for legged robots due to reduced shear strength and gravity-induced anisotropic yielding of granular media. Using a hexapedal robot on a tiltable granular bed,…
Identifying and controlling an unstable, underactuated robot to enable reference tracking is a challenging control problem. In this paper, a ballbot (robot balancing on a ball) is used as an experimental setup to demonstrate and test…
Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and…
Snake robots have been studied for decades with the aim of achieving biological snakes' fluent locomotion. Yet, as of today, their locomotion remains far from that of the biological snakes. Our recent study suggested that snake locomotion…
A spherical robot consists of an externally spherical rigid body rolling on a two-dimensional surface, actuated by an auxiliary mechanism. For a class of actuation mechanisms, we derive a controller for the geometric center of the sphere to…
We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the…
In this article a multi-segmented planar tensegrity mechanism was presented. This mechanism has a three-segment structure with each segment residing on top of another. The size of the segments may decrease proportionally from base to top,…
Synthetic active collectives, composed of many nonliving individuals capable of cooperative changes in group shape and dynamics, hold promise for practical applications and for the elucidation of guiding principles of natural collectives.…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
Several robot manipulation tasks are extremely sensitive to variations of the physical properties of the manipulated objects. One such task is manipulating objects by using gravity or arm accelerations, increasing the importance of mass,…