6 accepted papers
Soft robots offer an opportunity to embed intelligence directly into morphology, potentially reducing the need for continuous feedback regulation. We present an autonomous, minimally actuated multi-stable soft robot for exploration in confined and cluttered environments. The robot is composed of a s…
Electric actuators are commonly used in machines and the optimal energy efficiency can be achieved only at certain speeds. This letter introduces the Quasi-Passive-Dynamics-based Elastic Actuator (QPD-EA), which enhances energy efficiency by leveraging passive dynamics and energy recycling. Instead
Inchworm crawling allows for both quasistatic and dynamic gaits at a wide range of actuation frequencies. This locomotion mechanism is common in nonskeletal animals and exploited extensively in the bio-inspired field of soft robotics. In this work we develop and simulate the hybrid dynamic crawling
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 we study the inchworm crawling of our soft robot with two b
Hopping is a highly dynamic motion requiring precise input over brief moments of ground contact in order to achieve desired performance. While this problem has been approached from multiple perspectives, this work provides a comparative analysis of two robot models. The first model uses an actuator…
Dynamic bipedal robot locomotion has achieved remarkable success due in part to recent advances in trajectory generation and nonlinear control for stabilization. A key assumption utilized in both theory and experiments is that the robot’s stance foot always makes no-slip contact with the ground, inc…