More Like this

1. Balloon Animal Robots: Reconfigurable Isoperimetric Inflated Soft Robots

   Stuart, Anthony D; Hammond, Zachary M; Follmer, Sean (January 2021, 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS))

   null (Ed.)

   This paper introduces a new class of soft reconfigurable robot: balloon animal robots. The balloon animal robot consists of a closed volume inflatable tube which can be reconfigured into structures of varying topology by a collective of simple sub-unit robots. The robotic sub-units can (1) drive along the length of the tube to localize a joint, (2) create pinch points that locally reduce the bending stiffness of the tube to form a joint, and (3) selectively mechanically couple to one another through cable driven actuators to create nodes of the structure. In this work we introduce the hardware necessary to construct the robot, present experiments to guide the hardware design, and formulate an algorithm using graph theory to calculate the number of nodes and node connections needed to form different 2D shapes. Finally, we demonstrate the system with two active nodes and four passive nodes forming multiple 2D shapes from the same hardware. 

   more » « less
2. Best Viewpoints for External Robots or Sensors Assisting Other Robots

   https://doi.org/10.1109/THMS.2021.3090765  

   Dufek, Jan; Xiao, Xues; Murphy, Robin R. (August 2021, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems)
3. Robots with Tails

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.2021-NOV2  

   Ben-Tzvi, Pinhas; Liu, Yujiong (November 2021, Mechanical Engineering)

   Abstract Until recently, most four-legged robots have lacked a feature that is found again and again in nature—a tail. Studies of animal locomotion and robots in the laboratory indicate that leaving out tails has been a design drawback. In fact, research conducted by our lab at Virginia Tech has shown that an articulated robotic tail can effectively maneuver and stabilize a quadruped both for static and dynamic locomotion. 

   more » « less
4. Modeling Soft Robots

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-68620-7_4  

   Godage, Isuru; Gilbert, Hunter (January 2024, Springer Nature Switzerland)
5. Soft Underwater Robots

   Hall, Robin (April 2025, WPI)