相关论文: Shape-programmable Adaptive Multi-material Microro…

Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…

Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…

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…

Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…

We present a distributed algorithm for a swarm of active particles to camouflage in an environment. Each particle is equipped with sensing, computation and communication, allowing the system to take color and gradient information from the…

The transport and deformation of confined droplets and flexible capsules are central to diverse phenomena and applications, from biological flows in microcapillaries to industrial processes in porous media. Inspired by experiments, we…

Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…

Viscoelasticity governs the locomotion strategies of deformable microorganisms, rendering it a fundamental mechanical property of microbial motility and an integral component in the design of envisioned microbots. Recent studies have shown…

We investigate the collective behavior of suspended thermoresponsive microgels, that expel solvent and subsequently decrease in size upon heating. Using a binary mixture of differently thermoresponsive microgels, we demonstrate how…

Robots deployed at orders of magnitude different size scales, and that retain the same desired behavior at any of those scales, would greatly expand the environments in which the robots could operate. However it is currently not known…

High-density microfluidics is becoming an important experimental platform for studying complex biological systems such as synthetic gene regulatory networks, molecular biocomputating of engineered cells, distributing rapid point-of-care…

Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…

Soft robots, in contrast to their rigid counter parts, have infinite degrees of freedom that are coupled with their interaction with the environment. We consider the locomotion of an untethered robot, in the granular medium, comprised of…

Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…

Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…

Inspired by the snap-through action of a steel hairclip, we propose a design method for in-plane prestressed mechanisms that exhibit biomimetic morphing and high locomotion performance. Compliant bistable flapping mechanisms are fabricated…

Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…

Deep reinforcement learning has recently been applied to a variety of robotics applications, but learning locomotion for robots with unconventional configurations is still limited. Prior work has shown that, despite the simple modeling of…

In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…