Soft robots provide an opportunity to bridge the gap between machines and people. In contrast to hard bodied robots, soft robots have bodies made out of intrinsically soft and/or extensible materials (e.g. silicone rubbers) that can deform and absorb much of the energy arising from ...
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In this project we are developing self-driving cars for customized mobility on demand as part of the SMART program. The objective is to develop data-driven customized transportation. We are developing a fleet of self-driving cars consisting of golf carts and electric cars. Mobility on demand ...
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A great challenge with today’s robots is that it takes a long time to design and fabricate new robots. We need to speed up the creation of robots. Many different types of robots are available today, but each of these robots took many years to ...
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We are developing self-organizing systems of robots. Self-reconfiguring robots have the ability to modify their geometry without human intervention. They take on the body shape most suited for the task at hand. The idea is to make a module or voxel that can move to ...
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Distributed networked robot systems consist of multiple robots that are connected by communication. In these systems the robots interact locally with the environment. The objective is for the system as a whole to have guaranteed global behavior. Distributed robotics is an important area of robotics ...
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Manufacturing today has a problem to solve: how do we go from mass production to customized production? Robots have already enabled mass production and robots together with new computational systems have the potential to enable mass customization. Today, robots are used extensively in manufacturing. But ...
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We are developing algorithms and systems to create functional robots using printing processes. We wish to design the body of the robot flat. We wish for the robot to have built-in intelligence, and ability to move in the world. Once designed, the robot is printed ...
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Today we can record everything we do, as well as everything a robot does. These past experiences can be a very rich source for decision-making, but the data collected from sensors and actuators is too big and low-level. It needs to be summarized and mapped ...
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