Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid struts and elastic tendons, provide impact resistance, low mass, and adaptability to unstructured terrain. Their compliance and complex, coupled dynamics, however, present modeling and control challenges, hindering path planning and obstacle avoidance. This paper presents a complete, open-source, and reproducible system that enables navigation for a 3-bar tensegrity robot. The system comprises: (i) an inexpensive, open-source hardware design, and (ii) an integrated, open-source software stack for physics-based modeling, system identification, state estimation, path planning, and control. All hardware and software are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/tensegrity-navigation/. The proposed system tracks the robot's pose and executes collision-free paths to a specified goal among known obstacle locations. System robustness is demonstrated through experiments involving unmodeled environmental challenges, including a vertical drop, an incline, and granular media, culminating in an outdoor field demonstration. To validate reproducibility, experiments were conducted using robot instances at two different laboratories. This work provides the robotics community with a complete navigation system for a compliant, impact-resistant, and shape-morphing robot. This system is intended to serve as a springboard for advancing the navigation capabilities of other unconventional robotic platforms.

A new transforming turtle robot can explore treacherous regions where the land meets the sea--and may lead to future machines that navigate complex real-world conditions. Combining the best mobility features of an ocean-swimming turtle and a land-walking tortoise, the Amphibious Robotic Turtle (ART), described recently in Nature, can morph its limbs from turtlelike flippers to tortoiselike legs. "Most amphibious robots … use dedicated propulsion systems in each environment," says Yale University roboticist Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, who is the senior author on the paper. "Our system adapts a single unified propulsion mechanism for both environments: it has four limbs, and those limbs can transition between a flipper state for aquatic locomotion and a leg state for terrestrial locomotion." Each morphing limb is surrounded by a composite polymer material that is malleable when hot and stiff when cool.

Scientists have created a robotic fabric that stiffens and relaxes in response to changes in temperature, which could be used in emergency situations. The material, developed at Yale University in the US, is equipped with a system of heat sensors and threads that stiffen to change the fabric's shape. Under heat changes, it can bend and twist to transform itself into adaptable clothing, shape-changing machinery and self-erecting shelters. Video footage shows the material going from a flat, ordinary fabric to a load-bearing structure supporting a weight, a model airplane with flexible wings and a wearable robotic tourniquet that activates in response to damage. 'We believe this technology can be leveraged to create self-deploying tents, robotic parachutes, and assistive clothing,' said Professor Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio at Yale University.

The Octobot is fabricated by combining soft lithography, molding, and 3D printing. In a laboratory at Yale University, a soft toy horse with prosthetic coverings around its foam-stuffed legs has taken its first tentative steps. Despite its stiff and not entirely coordinated gait, the toy demonstration may point the way toward helping space agencies put lighter, more versatile robots into space. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, says she was wrestling with the problem of how to allow robots to handle a wider variety of jobs than current approaches, which often focus on performing a single function well, when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued a request for novel robot designs based on lighter, plastic approaches. Rather than attempt to lift many single-task robots into orbit, the space agency wants a single reconfigurable machine to be able to handle different tasks and, occasionally, to act as prosthetics for human astronauts.

A Yale researcher has created a'robo-skin' that could bring toys to life. Called'OmniSkin,' the flexible elastic can be fitted to stuffed toys and a variety of inanimate objects and, thanks to sensors and actuators, enable them to move. The robot'skin' can be programmed to turn almost any object into a robot, depending on how the elastic sheets are applied, or how many are applied at a time. Yale roboticists created'robo-skin' that can be affixed to almost any object. The robo-skin is made out of flexible, elastic sheets.