Unmanned ground vehicles are mostly wheeled, tracked, or legged. These locomotion mechanisms have a limited ability to traverse rough terrain and obstacles that are higher than the robot's center of mass. In order to improve the mobility of small rob...
This research proposes a new approach for the control of metameric robot locomotion via phase coordination. Unlike previous studies where global wave-like rules were pre-specified to construct the actuation sequence of segments, this phase coordinati...
Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics
Oct 22, 2015
RoboClam is a burrowing technology inspired by Ensis directus, the Atlantic razor clam. Atlantic razor clams should only be strong enough to dig a few centimeters into the soil, yet they burrow to over 70 cm. The animal uses a clever trick to achieve...
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
Oct 9, 2015
Humans and other terrestrial animals use vision to traverse novel cluttered environments with apparent ease. On one hand, although much is known about the behavioral dynamics of steering in humans, it remains unclear how relevant perceptual variables...
Natural substrates like sand, soil, leaf litter and snow vary widely in penetration resistance. To search for principles of appendage design in robots and animals that permit high performance on such flowable ground, we developed a ground control tec...
Providing unpredictable trajectories for patrol robots is essential when coping with adversaries. In order to solve this problem we developed an effective approach based on the known protean behavior of individual prey animals-random zig-zag movement...
The ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) is a soft material based actuator and sensor and has a promising potential in underwater application. This paper describes a hybrid biomimetic underwater vehicle that uses IPMCs as sensors. Propelled by the en...
Soft robotic snakes promise significant advantages in achieving traveling curvature waves with a reduced number of active segments as well as allowing for safe and adaptive interaction with the environment and human users. However, current soft robot...
We present a framework for designing cheap control architectures of embodied agents. Our derivation is guided by the classical problem of universal approximation, whereby we explore the possibility of exploiting the agent's embodiment for a new and m...
IEEE transactions on neural networks and learning systems
Aug 31, 2015
We propose a dual-arm cyclic-motion-generation (DACMG) scheme by a neural-dynamic method, which can remedy the joint-angle-drift phenomenon of a humanoid robot. In particular, according to a neural-dynamic design method, first, a cyclic-motion perfor...