Research

Dynamics and Control of Morphing Soft Robots

Shape-morphing Continuum and Articulated Soft Robotic Systems for Manipulation and Mobility

physical Human-Robot Interaction

Wearable Robotics and Soft Exoskeletons

Rehabilitation and physical Assist

Human Performance Augmentation

Biomorphing Soft Robots Design

Unconventional Soft Robotic Modules Fabricated through 3D printing, Liquid Polymers, and Textile.

Agricultural Robotics

Harvesting, Precision Farming, Crops and Farm environments Monitoring, Inspection, and Data Collection

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Dynamic Modeling and Control of physical Human-Soft-Robot Interaction for Collaborative Fine Motor Tasks

Umme Kawsar Alam

This research project investigates the dynamics and control of distributed physical interaction between a soft-robotic exoskeleton and the human hand to facilitate fine motor assistive motion and force for performing human-robot collaborative daily activities by individuals with motor function deficiency.

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Morphological Control: Exploiting Morphology of Underactuated Soft-bodied Robots for Manipulation and Mobility Control

Milad Hadipour

The long-term goal of this research is to enhance the control of soft-bodied robots for operation in unknown, unstructured, and dynamic environments with a high-level of autonomy, adaptation, and resiliency similar to their biological counterparts. The objective of this research project is to use principles of morphological control to develop a distributed control for adaptive and robust operation of soft continuum robotic arms. The morphology of the soft bodies will be exploited mainly from the prospective of shape-changing and stiffness variation corresponding to the desired structural configurations and the physical interactions with the surrounding environment to achieve targeted functionalities (e.g., trajectory tracking, stabilization, and manipulation).

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Muscle-based Locomotion of Snake Robots

Ayla Valles, Sabrina Montoya

This research project investigates the design, development, and control of a muscle-driven mechanism for snake-robot locomotion. The demand for developing autonomous robots with capability to adapt and operate in unstructured and unknown environments has recently emerged with potential for a variety of applications such as space exploration, search-and-rescue, and agriculture. Bio-inspired robots have shown potential for these applications. Particularly, biological snakes have fascinated roboticists over the past five decades due to their versatile limbless locomotion that adapt easily to different environments. Most snake-robots were designed as a rigid kinematic-chain with complex motor-driven mechanisms for locomotion. However, the recent advancements in soft-robotics help to enhance the capabilities of snake-robots by designing compliant and structurally deformable bodies that generate more complex motions compared to their rigid counterparts while reducing the cost, weight, and complexity of the structures. In the presented concept, pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) were integrated into each side of connecting links of a snake-robot to provide the rotational motion through their alternative contraction/extension. The muscle actuators are alternatively activated by applying pressurized air to move the connecting links relative to one another.

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robotic harvesting speedup.mp4

Agricultural Robotics for Chile Pepper Harvesting, Crops and Farm Environments Monitoring

Roman Langenscheidt. Erick Morales, Milad Hadipour, Umme Kawsar Alam, Hayden Zongker

New Mexico-type chile production faces challenges that include increasingly scarce irrigation resources and labor availability. Advanced technologies that have benefited other crops have not been explored for chile; this project seeks to embrace one of these innovations. Robotic technology will be investigated in research objectives including: (1) using sensor-equipped mobile robots to provide real-time data on actual soil and plant status in chile fields to optimize irrigation, (2) investigating water use efficiency (WUE) of chile plants under deficit irrigation, and (3) investigating the use of specialized robotic manipulators for mechanized harvest and pedicel removal of green chile fruit.

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Soft_Crawling_Robot_Power_Grid_Inspection.mp4

Biomorphing Soft Robots for Adaptive Locomotion

Navigating unknown and unstructured environments in space exploration is a challenge which requires versatile robots that can generate complex motions while adapting to the environment. Soft-robotics, as an emerging field inspired by versatile capabilities in soft animals like octopuses and caterpillars, has provided promising solutions to address this challenge. This project aims to investigate morphology of soft-bodied mechanisms for generating adaptive locomotion that facilitates the design of bio-inspired soft-robots for planetary surface exploration. Inherited compliance and large deformation features of soft-bodied robots will be exploited to generate different modes of locomotion. The objectives of this project are: 1) study the kinematics and dynamics of bio-inspired shape-morphing mechanisms for adaptive and versatile locomotion of soft-robots; 2) determine the underlying principles of design for soft-robots with adaptive morphology to achieve higher speed while being energy efficient; and 3) validate these principles by prototyping and testing a group of soft mechanisms for adaptive mobility on different terrains.

power-grid inspection soft robot.mp4

Agile and Energy-efficient Snake-Robot Locomotion

In this project, we investigate a novel 3D snake-like robot mechanism with varying orientations between the joint axes of rotations along the body of the robot that enables generating new internal motion patterns lead to agile locomotion with a high traversability mimicking biological snakes' capabilities to navigate across sandy environments and rough terrains. We study the proposed novel mechanism's kinematics, dynamics, motion planning, and control while validating the theoretical framework with a physical testbed.

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Timoshenko Beam-Based Dynamics of Soft Robotic Arms

The goal of this research project is to investigate the development of a theoretical framework for dynamic modeling of continuum and articulated shape-morphing soft robots based on the Timoshenko beam theory (TBT).

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