There is growing commercial interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments, specifically for package delivery applications. However, the size, complexity and sheer numbers of expected UAVs makes conventional air traffic management that relies on human air traffic controllers infeasible. To enable UAVs to safely and...
Soft robotics utilizes compliant materials (such as rubber) to make robots that are flexible and safe around humans, however these materials present many practical manufacturing challenges. Current fabrication methods use molding techniques which limits the soft robot designs which could be fabricated and impacts part consistency. This defense introduces a...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
Soft robotics is an emerging field that heavily relies on the ability of 3D printers. The limitations in soft robotics lie in the area of the 3D printers and the predictive models of the printed materials. There are currently no reliable models for optimizing the gradients required to create soft...
In shared autonomy, a robot and human user both have some level of control in order to achieve a shared goal. Choosing the balance of control given to the user and the robot can be a challenging problem since different users have different preferences and vary in skill levels when...
Deburring of machined parts is a crucial task in the aerospace and automotive industry. This process is still performed manually to a large extent due to the unpredictability of burr formation as well as the complex interactions between the human arm and the workpiece. Poor ergonomics, repetitive stress and strain...