Publication

Textbooks that provide a broad algorithmic perspective on the mechanics and dynamics of robots almost unfailingly serve students at the graduate level. Introduction to Autonomous Robots offers a much-needed resource for teaching third- and fourth-year undergraduates the computational fundamentals behind the design and control of autonomous robots. The authors use...

We present a novel augmented reality (AR) framework to show relevant information about swarm dynamics to a user in the absence of markers by using blinking frequency to distinguish between groups in the swarm. In order to distinguish between groups, clusters of the same group are identified by blinking at...

Locomotion through rolling is attractive compared to other forms of locomotion thanks to uniform designs, high degree of mobility, dynamic stability, and self-recovery from collision. Despite previous efforts to design rolling soft systems, pneumatic and other soft actuators are often limited in terms of high-speed dynamics, system integration, and/or functionalities...

NC: I see myself as a proponent of computation in the field of smart materials. But the word ‘smart’ is overloaded; there is also a lot of discussion about active materials. I created the term ‘robotic materials’ because I come from robotics and my research is on materials for robots...

Soft robotics is a field of robotic system design characterized by materials and structures that exhibit large-scale deformation, high compliance, and rich multifunctionality. The incorporation of soft and deformable structures endows soft robotic systems with the compliance and resiliency that makes them well-adapted for unstructured and dynamic environments. While actuation...

We present a library to automatically embed signal processing and neural network predictions into the material robots are made of. Deep and shallow neural network models are first trained offline using state-of-the-art machine learning tools and then transferred onto general purpose microcontrollers that are co-located with a robot's sensors and...