Videos

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31014 Animals such as squirrels and even bears have adapted to rapidly climb up trees and other complex vertical terrain, but achieving comparable agility has been a challenge for climbing robots. Existing robots often use walking gaits and move conservatively to stay in contact with the surface, which limits the range of dynamic maneuvers. In this paper we present a 290 g robot that, to our knowledge, is the first to climb vertically by bounding (with an aerial phase). We leverage a co-design workflow, in which the morphology and trajectory are jointly optimized for fast locomotion, subject to adhesion force limitations seen in spined grippers. The resulting trajectory includes a rapid maneuver that launches the robot vertically, and an aerial reorientation that brings the front grippers back to the surface using the rear leg as an inertial tail. We evaluate the resulting jump forces in 2D force space and demonstrate that the optimized morphology is capable of continuous climbing at a speed of 0.375 m/s (1.97 body lengths/s), and can also achieve ground locomotion and transition to a vertical surface. Our work proposes design insights for the jump-climbing maneuver and serves as an important step toward creating climbing robots with agility on par with that of animals.

This video presents a vine robot with material-level responsiveness, capable of steering towards light of heat stimulus. The paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07362

This video is from: Jumping on Air: Design and Modeling of Latch-mediated, Spring-actuated Air-jumpers. It was presented at IROS 2022. The paper is presented here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9981655

This paper presents SPHR: A Soft Pneumatic Hybrid Robot with extreme shape changing and lifting abilities. It was presented at IROS 2021. The paper is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636076

This video presents a set of untethered soft cellular robot with variable volume, friction, and unit-to-unit cohesion. It was presented at ICRA 2020. The paper is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9341351

This video presents a soft retraction device and internal camera mount for vine robots. It was presented at IROS in 2021. The paper is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9636697

This video presents the workings of a miniature capstan winch for mobile robots, with demonstrations on a jumping robot and pulling an RC car out of a ditch. This work was presented at IROS in 2022. The paper is available here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9834065

"Leveraging compliance and anisotropy to address robotic challenges" May 22, 2023.

This video summarizes how tip-extension, air fluidization, and asymmetry are used to create a soft burrowing robot. This work was published in the June 2021 issue of Science Robotics (https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/6/55), and is also available for free at https://www.hawkeslab.com/publications.