Background Utility pipes are a crucial component of public health and safety infrastructure, and it is critical to conduct regular inspections to ensure functionality. Currently, most pipes are inspected by human operators, which can pose safety concerns as well as inaccuracy and limited accessibility. As an alternative, in-pipe robots are increasingly...

­Soft robotics is a growing field of study encompassing biology, chemistry, materials science, and engineering. Soft robots can be used for safe and adaptive interaction with humans and harsh environments, manipulation of delicate objects, navigation through a confined space, and actuation with multiple degrees of freedom. One key element in soft...

Background Drones have provided significant improvements for industries including surveillance, research, and agriculture with their highly advanced aerial abilities. They provide enhanced safety and security measures and allow critical tasks to be completed remotely. Drones enable goods to be transported rapidly to remote areas with little infrastructure...

Lower-extremity hemiparesis, characterized by weakness or partial paralysis on one side of the body, significantly impacts a vast majority of stroke survivors. As a result, physical therapy intervention is crucial for the successful recovery and rehabilitation of a patient's gait cycle. During these sessions, physical therapists implement corrective...

Background Physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is increasingly used in applications where a human model needs to be developed to anticipate future actions including robot-assisted rehabilitation, robotic surgery, and collaborative manufacturing. Modeling humans is a challenging task because of the inherent uncertainties of human decision-making,...

Background Recent designs for quadrotors have focused on improving mechanical feasibility, including foldable and reconfigurable bodies. Foldable quadrotors, for example, are capable of flying through small openings and cluttered spaces. However, there has been limited research conducted on the tracking performance of the quadrotor during in-flight...

Multi-robot systems (MRS) composed of multiple mobile robots have been used for various collective exploration and perception tasks, such as mapping unknown environments, disaster response, and surveillance and monitoring. The performance of MRS in such applications is constrained by the capabilities of the payloads that the robots can carry on-board,...

Perching highlights the ability for aerial robots to save energy and maintain a vantage position for monitoring or surveillance. Existing aerial robots coordinate perching mechanisms and flight dynamics to achieve perching. However, there is often a dissociation between controlled collision and dynamic perching in existing designs of aerial robots,...

­Background The advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has opened numerous opportunities for executing perilous and mission-critical tasks such as search and rescue, exploration in radioactive and hazardous environments, inspection of vertical structures, and water sample collection. The task of object collection on water surfaces is challenging...

For a rigid quadrotor, flying through constrained spaces often relies on computer vision techniques to execute aggressive maneuvers or performing real-time trajectory re-planning to avoid cluttered areas. Alternatively, a quadrotor can have an adaptive morphology, where a folding mechanism helps the quadrotor fly through narrow apertures. In previous...