Related papers: Bird-Inspired Spatial Flapping Wing Mechanism via …
Legged locomotion is a challenging task in the field of robotics but a rather simple one in nature. This motivates the use of biological methodologies as solutions to this problem. Central pattern generators are neural networks that are…
Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…
Robotic blimps, as lighter-than-air aerial platforms, offer extended operational duration and enhanced safety in human-robot interactions due to their buoyant lift. However, achieving robust flight performance under environmental airflow…
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…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…
This paper presents a dynamic model and a control system for a flapping-wing unmanned aerial vehicle. Inspired by flight characteristics captured from live Monarch butterflies, a new dynamic model is presented to account the effects of…
In this paper, a 1-DoF gripper mechanism has been synthesized for the type of mechanism, number of links and joints, and the dimensions of length, width and thickness of links. The type synthesis is done by selecting the proper class of…
We present a steady jet flow-based flow control of flexible membrane wings for an adaptive and efficient motion of bat-inspired drones in complex flight environments. A body-fitted variational computational aeroelastic framework is adopted…
Under-actuated compliant robotic systems offer a promising approach to mitigating actuation and control challenges by harnessing pre-designed, embodied dynamic behaviors. This paper presents Flix-Walker, a novel, untethered,…
Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…
Under-actuated robot grippers as a pervasive tool of robots have become a considerable research focus. Despite their simplicity of mechanical design and control strategy, they suffer from poor versatility and weak adaptability, making…
Morphology of a robot design is important to its ability to achieve a stated goal and therefore applying machine learning approaches that incorporate morphology in the design space can provide scope for significant advantage. Our study is…
In this paper, we propose a novel type of serial robot with minimal actuation. The robot is a serial rigid structure consisting of multiple links connected by passive joints and of movable actuators. The novelty of this robot is that the…
A linkage mechanism consists of rigid bodies assembled by joints which can be used to translate and transfer motion from one form in one place to another. In this paper, we are particularly interested in a family of spacial linkage…
Air-dispersed sensor networks deployed from aerial robotic systems (e.g., UAVs) provide a low-cost approach to wide-area environmental monitoring. However, existing methods often rely on active actuators for mid-air shape or trajectory…
We present an algorithm to compute planar linkage topology and geometry, given a user-specified end-effector trajectory. Planar linkage structures convert rotational or prismatic motions of a single actuator into an arbitrarily complex…
In this article, a floating robotic emulation platform for a virtual demonstration of satellite motion in space is presented. The robotic platform design is characterized by its friction-less, levitating, yet planar motion over a…
An aerial vehicle powered by flapping feathered wings was designed, developed and fabricated. Different from legacy flapping-wing aerial vehicles with membrane wings, the new design uses authentic bird feathers to fabricate wings. In field…