Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) have emerged as versatile and promising devices for a multitude of applications, including soft robotics, haptic interfaces, and artificial muscles. DEAs are an interesting soft actuator technology due to their high en ...
Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)2024
The use of soft and stretchable materials allows the development of adaptive robotic systems and human-machine interfaces that are more natural and comfortable to interact with. One of the application fields that benefits the most from these compliant mate ...
Humans use tools to complete impact-aware tasks, such as hammering a nail or playing tennis. The postures adopted to use these tools can significantly influence the performance of these tasks, where the force or velocity of the hand holding a tool plays a ...
Designing novel materials is greatly dependent on understanding the design principles, physical mechanisms, and modeling methods of material microstructures, requiring experienced designers with expertise and several rounds of trial and error. Although rec ...
Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...
Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...
As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...
Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...
The digitization of timber construction, the emergence of engineered wood products, and the urgent need to drastically reduce buildings' environmental impact have given a rebirth to wood as a construction material. On the one hand, increasing the use of ti ...
The thesis at hand is concerned with robots' navigation in human crowds. Specifically, methods are developed for planning a mobile robot's local motion between pedestrians, and they are evaluated in experiments where a robot interacts with real pedestrians ...
Programming intelligent robots requires robust controllers that can achieve desired tasks while adapting to the changes in the task and the environment. In this thesis, we address the challenges in designing such adaptive and anticipatory feedback controll ...
