ABS T R A C T BACKGROUND: Upper limb (UL) motor impairment following stroke is a leading cause of functional limitations in activities of daily living. Robot-assisted therapy supports rehabilitation, but how its efficacy and the underlying neural mechanism ...
Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new exploration and 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 ...
In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...
Myoelectric prostheses allow users to recover lost functionality by controlling a robotic device with their remaining muscle activity. Commercial devices usually use a two-recording-channel system placed on specific muscles to control a single degree of fr ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Humans coordinate the abundant degrees of freedom (DoFs) of hands to dexterously perform tasks in everyday life. We imitate human strategies to advance the dexterity of multi-DoF robotic hands. Specifically, we enable a robot hand to grasp multiple objects ...
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 ...