Adhesion and Applications: Grasping and climbing vertical surfaces with gecko-inspired controllable, directional dry adhesives. Research includes the continued development of StickybotIII, new adhesives and manufacturing methods, and new applications such as perching UAVs and grasping space junk.

Mobile Manipulation: Selectively compliant, under-actuated hands with tactile sensing. Research includes underwater hand and grasp analysis and development of artificial skins with pressure, shear and dynamic tactile sensors. Multi-limbed climbing also involves grasping surfaces and manipulating the robot's own body.

MR compatible tools: Optical fibers are embedded in biopsy needles used for MRI interventions to provide realtime measurement of bending deflections and tip forces. Fibers transmit energy to shape memory alloy (NiTi) actuators for active steering.

Multi-Modal Robots: Bio-inspired robots that can transition between various kinds of locomotion, from jumping to flying to climbing vertical walls using adhesives and microspines. This has grown out of our efforts in both Fixed Wing Perching and Quadrotor Perching, as well as our JumpGliding project.

Wearable Haptics: feedback for altering dynamic motions such as jogging or walking, to reduce the chance of injury or delay the progression of osteoarthritis. Projects include dynamic gait analysis and the development of wearable sensors and feedback devices.

Also looking at AutomotiveHaptics applications

Human-safe and human-centered robotics: design tools and methods to mitigate impact damage during unintended human-robot interactions. Projects include collaboration with Prof. Oussama Khatib in the Computer Science Department on the Stanford Safety Robot, incorporation of capacitive skin sensors into robotic platforms for collision detection and post impact behaviors.

Stroke Rehabilitation: We seek to optimize metrics for stroke recovery and understand the effects of proprioceptive deficit and augmentation on motor control. We are currently designing experimentation to characterize the effects of sensory deficits on single-joint motor control and developing unobtrusive wearable devices to augment clinical functional tests and ultimately provide a take-home therapeutic device to improve functional outcomes.

Tunable compliance and damping: structures based on electroactive polymer actuators with electrically-tunable stiffness and damping properties for use in dynamic systems. Projects include control of damping through electrical boundary conditions and control of stiffness through design geometry and electrical activation as well as applications to the perching UAV.

Manufacturing and Prototyping: manufacturing and prototyping methods are an important part of what we do for all our other projects. These pages collect information about some of the processes, equipment and materials we work with