11/2020: Haijie successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Biologically Inspired Perching for Aerial Robots,” becoming the lab’s first Ph.D. graduate.
11/2020: We publish a paper in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, showcasing how mechanical intelligence can be leveraged for aerial perching (New Atlas).
09/2020: Our lab was granted a patent on the bistable gripper for aerial grasping and perching.
07/2020: Our lab published a paper in Soft Robotics to demonstrate how twisted-and-coiled actuators can enable soft robots with programmable motions (CSU News)
05/2020: Our lab published a paper in Science Advances to demonstrate how elastic instability can enhance the performance of soft robots (Led by Prof. Yin at NCSU).
03/2020: In collaboration with Opterus R&D, our lab received an STTR grant from DARPA to investigate self-reconfigurable ground robots.
10/2019: Our lab publishes a paper in Science Advances to unravel the coupled mechanical and computational intelligence involved in the upside-down landing of flies (Led by Dr. Cheng at Penn State).
08/2019: Ben Pawlowski successfully defended his Master’s thesis on “Modeling, Simulation, and Control of Soft Robots.”
04/2019: Our group members have received several notable awards:
Brandon Tighe won 2nd place at the Multicultural Undergraduate Research Art and Leadership Symposium (MURALS) and received the junior researcher award at E-days.
Jordan Julian earned high honors in the Celebrate Undergraduate Research and Creativity Showcase (CURC) for his research on walking robots.
The NASA robotic mining team, supervised by Dr. Zhao, was selected as the 1st place mechanical engineering senior design project.
02/2019: Our lab participates in the annual open house hosted by the Little Shop of Physics (LSOP) as a science partner, showcasing our robots to more than 8,000 visitors.
02/2019: Our recent research on reconfigurable robots, published in Robotics and Automation Letters, was featured in IEEE spectrum robotics blog.
10/2018: Jiefeng and Ben’s paper on embedded shape morphing using twisted-and-coiled actuators was selected as a finalist for the best student paper in the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
08/2018: Our lab received an NSF grant to investigate vision-guided perching for small flying robots in collaboration with Dr. Bo Cheng at Penn State.
05/2018: Dr. Zhao received the Research Initiation Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate embedded and continuous shape morphing using twisted-and-coiled actuators.
01/2018: Anthony Demario successfully defended his Master’s thesis on “3D Printable Walking Robot with Soft Joints and Links.”
12/2017: Ali Abbas successfully defended his Master’s thesis on “Modeling of Twisted and Coiled Artificial Muscle for Actuation and Self-Sensing.” He is our lab’s first MS graduate.
08/2015: The Adaptive Robotics Laboratory was established at the Energy Institute, Colorado State University.
