8 accepted papers
Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations. However, commercial drones can generally only carry 10 %–30 % of their own…
Marangoni propulsion is well-known aquatic locomotion exhibited by some aquatic insects. After secreting chemicals to reduce the surface tension nearby, they are rapidly propelled by the force originated from the surface tension gradient. Inspired by their locomotion, a water surface skimming device
Polypyrrole (PPy) has been widely used as an electro active polymer actuator owing to its high energy density, and the applicability in low voltage (i.e. less than 3 V) driven systems. Its scalable fabrication process also enables a PPy actuator to be used in mesoscale (a few millimeter to centimete
Sensed information greatly helps a robot to adjust its motion or modulate the locomotory behavior. While many sensing components have been developed for macroscale robots, such off-the-shelf sensors are hardly integrated with a mesoscale (i.e., 0.1 mm to 10 mm) robot due to the size limitation. In t…
Locomotion of water beetles have been widely studied in biology owing to their remarkable swimming skills. Here, we investigated the coordination between the two pairs of legs to achieve steady swimming with novel hair-like appendages. Some design considerations and a fabrication of the hair-like ap…
A Marangoni propulsion is exhibited by some aquatic insects such as rove beetles as a means of rapid escaping by secreting surfactant that lowers the surface tension behind them. Inspired by their locomotion, we proposed a non-tethered miniature robot that can skim and steer on the water surface wit…
A water beetle is skillful at drag-powered swimming by using its oar-like legs. Inspired by this mechanism, a miniature robot, whose mobility is obtained by a pair of legs attached with swimming appendages, was studied in this work. The robot in this paper has optimally designed linkage structures t…
In this paper, a rotational leg-type miniature robot with an actuated middle joint and tail, called RoMiRAMT, is proposed for stable locomotion and improved climbing ability. The robot has four independently actuated rotational legs, giving it advantages of both wheel-type and leg-type locomotion. T…