Robotics Archives - UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering

No robot can match a squirrel’s ability to leap from limb to limb — until now

Engineers have designed robots that crawl, swim, fly and even slither like a snake, but no robot can hold a candle to a squirrel, which can parkour through a thicket of branches, leap across perilous gaps and execute pinpoint landings on the flimsiest of branches.

New assistive device enhances grasping for people with spinal cord injuries

More than 15 million people worldwide are living with spinal cord injury (SCI), which can affect their sensory and motor functions below the injury level. For individuals with SCI between C5 and C7 cervical levels, this can mean paralysis affecting their limbs and limited voluntary finger and wrist flexion, making it difficult to grasp large,…

ME Professor and Ph.D. Student’s Research Featured in Soft Robotics

Squishy Robotics, UC Berkeley’s BEST (Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities) Lab, and a NASA Ames co-author were on the cover of the June 2024 issue of Soft Robotics journal. The referenced paper was co-authored by Dr. Kyunam Kim, as lead author, with ME Professor Emeritus Alice M. Agogino and Dr. Adrian K. Agogino, a NASA Ames…

Entrepreneurship at Berkeley

Started at UC Berkeley, Squishy Robotics provides lifesaving and cost-saving information in real time through rapidly deployable mobile sensor robots. As a majority female-owned startup, they prioritize diversity and inclusion while creating technology for a range of applications on planet Earth.

This device from Berkeley’s Squishy Robotics looks like a toy, but acts like an action hero

A recently posted YouTube video shows a firefighter putting what looks like a toy, but is actually a robot, into a clear testing chamber. He fills the chamber with hydrogen gas, and then gleefully ignites the atmosphere. “You can guess what happens then — there’s a BIG boom,” said Alice Agogino. Agogino, the co-founder and CEO of Squishy…

ME Assistant Professor Hannah Stuart Wins NSF CAREER Award

ME Assistant Professor Hannah Stuart has won the NSF CAREER Award for Robotic Augmentation of Human Reflexes and Reach through Collaborative Grasping. Professor Stuart’s CAREER project will create a new generation of effective and affordable wearable robotic assistance for people with severe weakness or partial paralysis of the hands and arms, such as might arise…

Patrick Cheng, MEng ’22 (ME): “You can’t grow without facing uncomfortable situations”

After graduating as a UCLA Bruin and working in industry for a couple of years, Patrick Cheng found he was destined to be a Golden Bear, joining UC Berkeley’s one-year Master of Engineering (MEng) program in 2021. There, he earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration on the control of robotic and…

ME Student Group, Berkeley Combat Robotics, Competes on BattleBots

BattleBots is a Discovery Channel TV show that has been running since the 90s on various networks and airs in over 150 countries; it’s the highest level of combat robotics, in which 250lb robots rip each other apart for a chance to win the coveted Golden Bolt. Just over two years ago, a few incoming…

Goalkeeping Robot Dog Tends Its Net Like a Pro

The best professional football goalkeepers in the English Premiere League (we’re talking about the sport called soccer in North America) are able to save almost, but not quite, 80 percent of shots taken on goal. This is very good. But it’s not nearly as good as the 87.5 percent of shots that a 9kg quadrupedal robot…

Digging Deep: Inspired by nature, the burrowing mole crab robot is a feat of engineering with real-world applications

The unassuming Pacific mole crab, Emerita analoga, is about to make some waves. UC Berkeley researchers have debuted a unique robot inspired by this burrowing crustacean that may someday help evaluate the soil of agricultural sites, collect marine data and study soil and rock conditions at construction sites. In a study published today in Frontiers…

Fired Up for the Future

As another potentially devastating wildfire season begins, California is facing a shortage of wildland firefighters. To meet this challenge, the Marin County Fire Department and UC Berkeley have partnered to form FIRE Foundry (Fire, Innovation, Recruitment and Education), a program that recruits young adults from underrepresented communities for a career in fire service and trains them on…

Ottobock Acquires Exoskeleton Specialist suitX

AUSTIN, Texas & DUDERSTADT, Germany–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ottobock, a leading global innovator for prosthetics, orthotics, and exoskeletons, today announced the acquisition of 100 percent of the shares of suitX, a US-based company spun out of the Robotics and Human Engineering Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, which specializes in the research and development of occupational and…

Team CERBERUS Wins DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Team CERBERUS won the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and a $2,000,000 prize reward that comes along! Team CERBERUS is an international consortium involving the University of Nevada Reno (prime contract), ETH Zurich, NTNU, University of California Berkeley, University of Oxford, Flyability, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Team Leader is Prof. Dr. Kostas Alexis – of NTNU’s…

Insect-sized robot navigates mazes with the agility of a cheetah

Many insects and spiders get their uncanny ability to scurry up walls and walk upside down on ceilings with the help of specialized sticky footpads that allow them to adhere to surfaces in places where no human would dare to go. Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have used the principle behind these some…

The ‘Iron Man’ body armour many of us may soon be wearing

Imagine wearing high-tech body armour that makes you super strong and tireless. Such technology, more specifically called an exoskeleton, sounds like the preserve of the Iron Man series of superhero movies. Yet the equipment is increasingly being worn in real life around the world. And one manufacturer – California’s SuitX – expects it to go…

UC Berkeley researchers create robotic guide dog for visually impaired people

As UC Berkeley Ph.D. student Jun Zeng puts on a blindfold, he is led by a guide dog through a maze of cardboard boxes. They reach a narrow path, and the guide dog pauses, readjusts, then pulls on the leash to let Zeng know it is safe to continue. But this is no ordinary guide…

Capstone Project Profile: Adapting Humanoid Robots to Aid First Responders

Disaster relief demands both speed and adaptability to complex terrain; however, modern robots, which offer the potential to aid first responders, are currently specialized either for speed (wheeled robots) or for adaptability (legged robots). Our team is working to enable the transition of bipedal robots between legged locomotion and wheeled transportation. Our approach is to…

UC Berkeley Researchers Motivated by Society, Personal Interests, Scientific Community

exoskeleton

Mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni, who has developed marketable exoskeletons — wearable devices that assist people who have limited mobility — sees applied research as a more effective means of accomplishing his goals. “There are urgent technological problems that need to be solved since the results would be life changing,” Kazerooni said in an email.…

The EDG Lab Discovers How to Better Design Skin for Handling Wet and Submerged Objects

Robotics research

Real world environments, such as kitchens, present objects covered in viscous fluids: soap, oil, water, etc. Understanding and designing for slippery and submerged contact, where fluid lubrication is present, is a continuing challenge in the robotics community. Contact area, bending stiffness, and the presence of a viscous fluid affect friction. This work focuses on milliscale…

Q&A with the Capstone Winners of 2020 Fung Institute Mission Award

The Fung Institute Mission Award is given to the capstone team that best exemplifies the mission of the institute: “Shaping generations of technical leaders to innovate across boundaries.” Finalists are nominated by Fung Instructors, and winners are chosen by Fung Institute staff based on the project brief.. This award is presented to the Adapting Humanoid Robots…

ME Professor Alice Agogino Named Among Top 10 Women in Robotics Industry

Squishy robots are quickly deployable mobile sensing robots for disaster rescue, remote monitoring and space exploration, created from the research at the BEST Lab or Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities Lab. Prof. Alice Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Product Design Concentration Founder and Head Advisor, MEng Program at the University…

UC Berkeley Researchers Find Pasta Can Help Build Assistive Robots

UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering Oliver O’Reilly and campus graduate mechanical engineering student Nathaniel Goldberg constructed a model showing changes in the shape of spaghetti after it is placed in water, which could help researchers create more human-like robots.

Is Spaghetti the Key to Building a Better Robot?

Look at some spaghetti and you might think lunch. When Oliver O’Reilly looks at spaghetti, he thinks about the future of robotics. Pasta and robots might not seem like natural bedfellows, but O’Reilly, a UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering, hopes his research can help engineers construct better models and designs for soft robots.

Capstone Project Profile: Coding-Free Robot Control – Rapid Learning for Automated Processes

Industrial robot arms are widely used in various fields including manufacturing automation. When these robots need to adapt to a new production task, reprogramming of the control is the key. Our goal is to make this transition process more user-friendly, cost-effective, and adaptive, by enabling a robot arm to mimic human motions without explicit programming.…

Bipedal Robot Cassie Cal Learns to Juggle

There’s no particular reason why knowing how to juggle would be a useful skill for a robot. Despite this, robots are frequently taught how to juggle things. Blind robots can juggle, humanoid robots can juggle, and even drones can juggle. Why? Because juggling is hard, man! You have to think about a bunch of different things at once,…

Swappable Flying Batteries Keep Drones Aloft Almost Forever

Battery power is a limiting factor for robots everywhere, but it’s particularly problematic for drones, which have to make an awkward tradeoff between the amount of battery they carry, the amount of other more useful stuff they carry, and how long they can spend in the air. Consumer drones seem to have settled around about a…

Paralyzed Man Walks with Brain-Controlled Exoskeleton

A man paralyzed from the shoulders down has been able to walk using a pioneering four-limb robotic system, or exoskeleton, that is commanded and controlled by signals from his brain. With a ceiling-mounted harness for balance, the 28-year-old tetraplegic patient used a system of sensors implanted near his brain to send messages to move all…

Sensor Robots Can Handle Hazardous Situations

The “Squishy Robot” is equipped with six cameras, GPS, and various interchangeable chemical, biological, and radiological sensors that deliver data and 360-degree videos in situations where human access can be difficult or unsafe.

You Can’t Squash This Roach-Inspired Robot

If the sight of a skittering bug makes you squirm, you may want to look away — a new insect-sized robot created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, can scurry across the floor at nearly the speed of a darting cockroach.

This Robot Ostrich Can Ride Around on Hovershoes

Proponents of legged robots say that they make sense because legs are often required to go where humans go. Proponents of wheeled robots say, “Yeah, that’s great but watch how fast and efficient my robot is, compared to yours.” Some robots try and take advantage of wheels and legs with hybrid designs like whegs or wheeled feet, but a simpler and…