Publications by Davide Zappetti

Unleashing Soft Modular Robots by means of a Bio-inspired Connection Strategy

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart, Davide Zappetti

Untethering can allow soft modular robots to move from the laboratory test bench into realistic environments and commercial use. However, today’s state of the art soft modular robots remain electrically connected to external power sources and controllers. ...

IEEE2022

Dual Stiffness Tensegrity Platform for Resilient Robotics

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Yi Sun, Davide Zappetti

Collision resilience is an important feature of robots deployed in unstructured and partially unpredictable environments. Herein, a novel dual stiffness (DS) tensegrity platform to integrate collision resilience into a robot body is proposed. The proposed ...

2022

Seeking Quality Diversity in Evolutionary Co-design of Morphology and Control of Soft Tensegrity Modular Robots

Dario Floreano, Davide Zappetti, Davide Zambrano, Giovanni Iacca

Designing optimal soft modular robots is difficult, due to non-trivial interactions between morphology and controller. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs), combined with physical simulators, represent a valid tool to overcome this issue. In this work, we investi ...

Association for Computing Machinery2021

Variable-Stiffness Tensegrity Modular Robots

Davide Zappetti

The need for a new generation of robots able to safely locomote and manipulate beside or cooperatively with humans or in un-constructed environments has recently emerged as a priority of the robotics community. ln the past two decades, this challenge has b ...

EPFL2021

Variable-stiffness tensegrity spine

Dario Floreano, Davide Zappetti, Enrico Ajanic, Roc Arandes Vilagrasa

Vertebrates, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, with their ability to change the stiffness of the spine to increase load-bearing capability or flexibility, have inspired roboticists to develop artificial variable-stiffness spines. However, ...

2020

Phase Changing Materials-Based Variable-Stiffness Tensegrity Structures

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Davide Zappetti

Soft robots leverage deformable bodies to achieve different types of locomotion, improve transportability, and safely navigate cluttered environments. In this context, variable-stiffness structures provide soft robots with additional properties, such as th ...

2020

Bio-Inspired Tensegrity Fish Robot

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Davide Zappetti, Timothée John Martin Peter, Yusuke Ikemoto

This paper presents a method to create fish-like robots with tensegrity systems and describes a prototype modeled on the body shape of the rainbow trout with a length of 400 mm and a mass of 102 g that is driven by a waterproof servomotor. The structure of ...

IEEE2020

A Soft Robot for Random Exploration of Terrestrial Environments

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Davide Zappetti, Jérémie Willemin

A swarm of randomly moving miniature robots is an effective solution for the exploration of unknown terrains. However, the deployment of a swarm of miniature robots poses two challenges: finding an adequate locomotion strategy for fast exploration and obst ...

IEEE2018

Bio-inspired Tensegrity Soft Modular Robots

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Jun Shintake, Davide Zappetti

In this paper, we introduce a design principle to develop novel soft modular robots based on tensegrity structures and inspired by the cytoskeleton of living cells. We describe a novel strategy to realize tensegrity structures using planar manufacturing te ...

Springer2017