On Penn Today – “A robot made of sticks”

In late summer, just as the leaves were starting to crisp and curl in the heat, Devin Carroll walked out of his apartment, looked on the ground, and picked up a couple of sticks that he thought might work for his robot. About half an inch thick and the length of an adult hand, he stripped the three sticks of their bark and lashed them with string to StickBot, a modular robot composed of circuitry, actuators, a microcontroller, and a motor driver.

Variable Topology Trusses (VTT)

Variable Topology Trusses (VTT) are a new type of modular self-reconfigurable robot. A VTT is composed of linear actuator modules that are connected to form a truss using reconfigurable joints. 

One application of VTT is to form a temporary support structure to shore up damaged buildings, protecting rescuers during a search and rescue operation.

Large-scale Autonomous Flight with Real-time Semantic SLAM under Dense Forest Canopy

The Kumar Lab is developing autonomous flying robots that can fly under forest canopies and between rows of trees in farms to provide tree growers and farmers with the necessary information for operations in agriculture and forestry. Specifically, robots explore in unstructured, GPS-denied environments without radio signals and create semantic maps