Morphological Adaptation in Robots Across Scales

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science (ENAS)

First Advisor

Kramer-Bottiglio, Rebecca

Abstract

Traditional robots are designed with fixed morphology and control policies, limiting their adaptability across tasks and environments. This thesis explores morphological adaptation as a means to enhance robotic versatility, integrating stiffness tuning, modular reconfiguration, and energy-aware control to enable robots to dynamically adjust their structure and behavior. At the material and component level, I developed jamming fibers that rapidly switch tensile stiffness with minimal impact on bending flexibility, enabling programmable shape deformations in soft robotic systems. I further introduced morphological editing via a reversible cohesive interface, allowing robots to autonomously add, remove, or reconfigure body parts. Building on these innovations, I applied morphological and stiffness adaptation to an untethered amphibious robotic turtle that optimizes locomotion efficiency across diverse terrains. Using a Cost of Transport (COT)-based control strategy, the robot autonomously adjusts its stiffness and gait in response to environmental feedback, reducing energy expenditure during transitions between land and water. By integrating material-level shape-morphing components with system-level adaptive control, this work demonstrates a pathway toward robots capable of real-time physical adaptation, improving their effectiveness in unstructured and unpredictable environments.

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