We present a new mechanism for passive wing morphing of flapping wings inspired by bat and bird wing morphology. The mechanism consists of an unactuated hand wing connected to the arm wing with a wrist joint. Flapping motion generates centrifugal acc...
This paper presents a bio-inspired quadruped controller that allows variable-speed galloping. The controller design is inspired by observations from biological runners. Quadrupedal animals increase the vertical impulse that is generated by ground rea...
Two bio-inspired guidance principles involving no reference frame are presented here and were implemented in a rotorcraft, which was equipped with panoramic optic flow (OF) sensors but (as in flying insects) no accelerometer. To test these two guidan...
In this study, a miniature artificial compound eye (15 mm in diameter) called the curved artificial compound eye (CurvACE) was endowed for the first time with hyperacuity, using similar micro-movements to those occurring in the fly's compound eye. A ...
A striking feature of biological pattern generators is their ability to respond immediately to multisensory perturbations by modulating the dwell time at a particular phase of oscillation, which can vary force output, range of motion, or other charac...
Comparing the leg of an ostrich to that of a human suggests an important question to legged robot designers: should a robot's leg joint bend in the direction of running ('forwards') or opposite ('backwards')? Biological studies cannot answer this que...
When millions of years of evolution suggest a particular design solution, we may be tempted to abandon traditional design methods and copy the biological example. However, biological solutions do not often translate directly into the engineering doma...
We design and test an octopus-inspired flexible hull robot that demonstrates outstanding fast-starting performance. The robot is hyper-inflated with water, and then rapidly deflates to expel the fluid so as to power the escape maneuver. Using this ro...
Controlled swimming of bio-inspired microrobots in confined spaces needs to be understood well for potential use in medical applications in conduits and vessels inside the body. In this study, experimental and computational studies are performed for ...
Fault detection and fault tolerance represent two of the most important and largely unsolved issues in the field of multirobot systems (MRS). Efficient, long-term operation requires an accurate, timely detection, and accommodation of abnormally behav...