5 accepted papers
Subterranean burrowing is inherently difficult for robots because of the high forces experienced as well as the high amount of uncertainty in this domain. Because of the difficulty in modeling forces in granular media, we propose the use of a novel machine-learning control strategy to obtain optimal…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and complex environments with ease. The robot consists of multip…
Soft actuators offer compliant and safe interaction with an unstructured environment compared to their rigid counterparts. However, control of these systems is often challenging because they are inherently under-actuated, have infinite degrees of freedom (DoF), and their mechanical properties can ch…
In a geometric mechanics framework, the configuration space is decomposed into a shape space and a position space. The internal motion of the system is prescribed by a closed loop in the shape space, which causes net motion in the position space. If the shape space is a simply connected domain in an…
Motion planning for mobile robots with many degrees-of-freedom (DoF) is challenging due to their high-dimensional configuration spaces. To manage this curse of dimensionality, this paper proposes a new hierarchical framework that decomposes the system into sub-systems (based on shared capabilities o…