Robots that can easily interact with humans and move through natural environments are becoming increasingly essential as assistive devices in the home, office and hospital. These machines need to be safe, effective, and easy to control. One strategy ...
Cephalopods such as octopuses have a combination of a stretchable skin and color-tuning organs to control both posture and color for visual communication and disguise. We present an electroluminescent material that is capable of large uniaxial stretc...
The energy consumption of worm robots is composed of three parts: heat losses in the motors, internal friction losses of the worm device and mechanical energy locomotion requirements which we refer to as the cost of transport (COT). The COT, which is...
Several robotics applications require high torque-to-weight ratio and energy efficient actuators. Progress in that direction was made by introducing compliant elements into the actuation. A large variety of actuators were developed such as series ela...
Robotic fish accomplish swimming by deforming their bodies or other fin-like appendages. As an emerging class of embedded computing system, robotic fish are anticipated to play an important role in environmental monitoring, inspection of underwater s...
This article serves as an overview of the unique challenges and opportunities made possible by a soft, jellyfish inspired, underwater robot. We include a description of internal pressure modeling as it relates to propulsive performance, leading to a ...
This paper presents the stability analysis of the leading edge spar of a flapping wing unmanned air vehicle with a compliant spine inserted in it. The compliant spine is a mechanism that was designed to be flexible during the upstroke and stiff durin...
Flexibility plays an important role in fish behavior by enabling high maneuverability for predator avoidance and swimming in turbulent flow. This paper presents a novel flexible fish robot equipped with distributed pressure sensors for flow sensing. ...
Simple mechanical models emulating fish have been used recently to enable targeted study of individual factors contributing to swimming locomotion without the confounding complexity of the whole fish body. Yet, unlike these uniform models, the fish b...