Robotics

We have developed a toy sized humanoid robot with soft air-filled modules on its links which sense contact and protect the robot and any interacting humans from damaging collisions.

In this work, we develop a controller for realizing smooth and accurate motion of a robotic head with application to a teleoperation system for the Furhat robot head.

We present the first approach for high-quality lightweight eye capture, which leverages a database of pre-captured eyes to guide the reconstruction of new eyes from much less constrained inputs, such as traditional single-shot face scanners or even a single photo from the internet.

We aim to create a hopping mechanism for a small-scale, one-legged, untethered hopping robot.

In this paper, we present the design process of these modules and demonstrate their efficacy by implementing a “grab and move” user interface for posing the robot link by link.

We present a new type of hydrostatic transmission that uses a hybrid air-water configuration, analogous to N+1 cable-tendon transmissions, using N hydraulic lines and 1 pneumatic line for a system with N degrees of freedom (DOFs).

VertiGo is a wall-climbing robot that is capable of transitioning from the ground to the wall, created in collaboration between Disney Research Zurich and ETH.