Related papers: Extreme dynamic symmetry enables omnidirectional a…
Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through…
Control systems are at the core of every real-world robot. They are deployed in an ever-increasing number of applications, ranging from autonomous racing and search-and-rescue missions to industrial inspections and space exploration. To…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
This paper presents a novel modular robot system that can self-reconfigure to achieve omnidirectional movements for collaborative object transportation. Each robotic module is equipped with a steerable omni-wheel for navigation and is…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
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…
A symmetry of a dynamical system is a map that transforms one trajectory to another trajectory. We introduce a new type of abstraction for hybrid automata based on symmetries. The abstraction combines different modes in a concrete automaton…
Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Imagine a swarm of terrestrial robots that can explore an environment, and, upon completion of this task, reconfigure into a spherical ball and roll out. This dimensional change alters the dynamics of locomotion and can assist them to…
Optimizing the energy efficiency of driving processes provides valuable insights into the underlying physics and is of crucial importance for numerous applications, from biological processes to the design of machines and robots. Knowledge…
Sidewinding, a locomotion strategy characterized by the coordination of lateral and vertical body undulations, is frequently observed in rattlesnakes and has been successfully reconstructed by limbless robotic systems for effective movement…
While multi-joint continuum robots are highly dexterous and flexible, designing an optimal robot can be challenging due to its kinematics involving curvatures. Hence, the current work presents a computational method developed to find…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Quadrupedal robots exhibit a wide range of viable gaits, but generating specific footfall sequences often requires laborious expert tuning of numerous variables, such as touch-down and lift-off events and holonomic constraints for each leg.…
Quadrupedal robots exhibit a wide range of viable gaits, but generating specific footfall sequences often requires laborious expert tuning of numerous variables, such as touch-down and lift-off events and holonomic constraints for each leg.…
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,…
Detecting distributional drift in high-dimensional data streams presents fundamental challenges: global comparison methods scale poorly, projection-based approaches lose geometric structure, and re-clustering methods suffer from identity…
Model-free reinforcement learning is a promising approach for autonomously solving challenging robotics control problems, but faces exploration difficulty without information of the robot's kinematics and dynamics morphology. The…
Symmetries, e.g. rotational and translational invariances for the class of mechanical systems, allow to characterize solution trajectories of nonlinear dynamical systems. Thus, the restriction to symmetry-induced dynamics, e.g. by using the…