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A mobility mechanism for robots to be used in tight spaces shared with people requires it to have a small footprint, to move omnidirectionally, as well as to be highly maneuverable. However, currently there exist few such mobility…
We introduce StaccaToe, a human-scale, electric motor-powered single-leg robot designed to rival the agility of human locomotion through two distinctive attributes: an actuated toe and a co-actuation configuration inspired by the human leg.…
Active matter composed of energy-generating microscopic constituents is a promising platform to create autonomous functional materials. However, the very presence of these microscopic energy sources is what makes active matter prone to…
Non-conservative loads of the follower type are usually believed to be the source of dynamic instabilities such as flutter and divergence. It is shown that these instabilities (including Hopf bifurcation, flutter, divergence, and…
This article is concerned with stability analysis and stabilization of randomly switched nonlinear systems. These systems may be regarded as piecewise deterministic stochastic systems: the discrete switches are triggered by a stochastic…
A recently developed model of random walks on a $D$-dimensional hyperspherical lattice, where $D$ is {\sl not} restricted to integer values, is extended to include the possibility of creating and annihilating random walkers. Steady-state…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. Developmental…
Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms owing to their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, they are relatively slow, and cannot run over large barriers. To address these limitations, we aim to…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
The application of biomechanic and motor control models in the control of bidedal robots (humanoids, and exoskeletons) has revealed limitations of our understanding of human locomotion. A recently proposed model uses the potential energy…
We characterize to what extent it is possible to modify the stationary states of a quantum dynamical semigroup, that describes the irreversible evolution of a two-level system, by means of an auxiliary two-level system. We consider systems…
A challenge in soft robotics and soft actuation is the determination of an elastic system which spontaneously recovers its trivial path during postcritical deformation after a bifurcation. The interest in this behaviour is that a…
We consider output trajectory tracking for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems whose internal dynamics may be modelled by infinite-dimensional systems which are bounded-input, bounded-output stable. We describe under which conditions…
We establish stability results for PD tracking control laws in bipedal walking robots. Stability of PD control laws for continuous robotic systems is an established result, and we extend this for hybrid robotic systems, an alternating…
Walking quadruped robots face challenges in positioning their feet and lifting their legs during gait cycles over uneven terrain. The robot Laika is under development as a quadruped with a flexible, actuated spine designed to assist with…
We aim at the stability of time-dependent motions, such as time-periodic ones, of a rigid body in a viscous fluid filling the exterior to it in 3D. The fluid motion obeys the incompressible Navier-Stokes system, whereas the motion of the…
Driven many-body quantum systems where some parameter in the Hamiltonian is varied quasiperiodically in time may exhibit nonequilibrium steady states that are qualitatively different from their periodically driven counterparts. Here we…
Any swimmer embedded on a inertialess fluid must perform a non-reciprocal motion to swim forward. The archetypal demonstration of this unique motion-constraint was introduced by Purcell with the so-called "scallop theorem". Scallop here is…
Bipedal balance is challenging due to its multi-phase, hybrid nature and high-dimensional state space. Traditional balance control approaches for bipedal robots rely on low-dimensional models for locomotion planning and reactive control,…
Underactuation is ubiquitous in human locomotion and should be ubiquitous in bipedal robotic locomotion as well. This chapter presents a coherent theory for the design of feedback controllers that achieve stable walking gaits in…