The locomotion of water beetles has been widely studied in biology owing to their remarkable swimming skills. Inspired by the oar-like legs of water beetles, designing a robot that swims under the principle of drag-powered propulsion can lead to high...
On compliant actuators, intermittent series-parallel elastic actuators (iSPEA) can reduce motor load by variable load cancellation through recruitment of parallel springs by a single motor. However, the potential to reduce electric energy consumed, c...
Snake-like robots with 3D locomotion ability have significant advantages of adaptive travelling in diverse complex terrain over traditional legged or wheeled mobile robots. Despite numerous developed gaits, these snake-like robots suffer from unsmoot...
Weakly electric fishes (Gymnotid and Mormyrid) use an electric field to communicate efficiently (termed electrocommunication) in the turbid waters of confined spaces where other communication modalities fail. Inspired by this biological phenomenon, w...
While insect grooming has been observed and documented for over one hundred years, we present the first quantitative analysis of this highly dynamic process. Pollinating insects, like honey bees, purposely cover themselves with millions of pollen par...
This paper aims to describe the disruptive potential that polymeric thin films have in the field of biohybrid devices and to review the recent efforts in this area. Thin (thickness < 1 mm) and ultra-thin (thickness < 1 µm) matrices possess a seri...
We introduce an octopus-inspired, underwater, soft-bodied robot capable of performing waterborne pulsed-jet propulsion and benthic legged-locomotion. This vehicle consists for as much as 80% of its volume of rubber-like materials so that structural f...
Robust and efficient target-tracking algorithms embedded on moving platforms, are a requirement for many computer vision and robotic applications. However, deployment of a real-time system is challenging, even with the computational power of modern h...
The growth of leading-edge vortices (LEV) on analogous flapping and rotating profiles has been investigated experimentally. Three time-varying cases were considered: a two-dimensional reference case with a spanwise-uniform angle-of-attack variation α...
Flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs) are a class of unmanned aircraft that imitate flight characteristics of natural organisms such as birds, bats, and insects, in order to achieve maximum flight efficiency and manoeuvrability. Designing proper ...