6 accepted papers
Anchoring is an important capability for mobile robots to conserve power, survey an area, or deploy a payload. However, the careful placement of an anchor in unstructured environments requires a great deal of dexterity, perception, and planning. Furthermore, many of the reversible adhesives that may
We present a low-cost, three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) prismatic-spherical-revolute (PSR) parallel mechanism used as a testing platform for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tethered to an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The mechanism has three actuated linear rails kinematically linked to a platform…
Existing platforms for underwater exploration and inspection are often limited to traversing open water and must expend large amounts of energy to maintain a position in flow for long periods of time. Many benthic animals overcome these limitations using legged locomotion and have different hydrodyn
Soft robots have recently demonstrated impressive abilities to adapt to objects and their environment with limited sensing and actuation. However, mobile soft robots are typically fabricated using laborious molding processes that result in limited actuated degrees of freedom and hence limited locomo…
Robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in our society in forms where they are assisting or interacting with humans in a variety of environments, and thus they must have the ability to sense and detect objects by touch. An ongoing challenge for soft robots has been incorporating flexible sensors…
Fluidically actuated soft robots show a great promise for operation in sensitive and unknown environments due to their intrinsic compliance. However, most previous designs use either flow control systems that are noisy, inefficient, sensitive to leaks, and cannot achieve differential pressure (i.e.…