Publications by Jürg Markus Germann

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adam Klaptocz, Mirko Kovac, Jürg Markus Germann

Many environments where robots are expected to operate are cluttered with objects, walls, debris, and different horizontal and vertical structures. In this chapter, we present four design features that allow small robots to rapidly and safely move in 3 dim ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2016

Programmable Self-assembly with Chained Soft Cells: An Algorithm to Fold into 2-D Shapes

Dario Floreano, Jürg Markus Germann, Joshua Evan Auerbach

Programmable self-assembly of chained modules holds potential for the automatic shape formation of morphologically adapted robots. However, current systems are limited to modules of uniform rigidity, which restricts the range of obtainable morphologies and ...

Springer International Publishing2014

Stretchable Electroadhesion for Soft Robots

Dario Floreano, Jürg Markus Germann, Bryan Edward Schubert

With the ongoing rise of soft robots there emerges a need for new soft robotic technologies that can cope with hyper-flexibility and stretchability. In this paper, we describe our developments on enabling controllable adhesion, namely electroadhesion, for ...

Ieee2014

Soft Cells for Programmable Self-Assembly of Robotic Modules

Dario Floreano, Jürg Markus Germann, Andrea Maesani, Ramon Pericet Camara

Programmable self-assembly of chained robotic systems holds potential for the automatic construction of complex robots from a minimal set of building blocks. However, current robotic platforms are limited to modules of uniform rigidity, which results in a ...

2014

Soft Cells for Modular Robots

Jürg Markus Germann

EPFL2014

Soft Cell Simulator: A tool to study Soft Multi-Cellular Robots

Dario Floreano, Manuel Stöckli, Jürg Markus Germann, Andrea Maesani

Modular or multi-cellular robots hold the promise to adapt their morphology to task and environment. However, research in modular robotics has traditionally been limited to mechanically non-adaptive systems due to hard building blocks and rigid connection ...

2013

An Active Connection Mechanism for Soft Modular Robots

Dario Floreano, Michael Dommer, Jürg Markus Germann, Ramon Pericet Camara

To date, most modular robotic systems lack flexibility when increasing the number of modules due to their hard building blocks and rigid connection mechanisms. In order to improve adaptation to environmental changes, softness on the module level might be b ...

2012

A Perching Mechanism for Micro Aerial Vehicles

Dario Floreano, Roland Siegwart, Mirko Kovac, Jürg Markus Germann

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with perching capabilities can be used to efficiently place sensors in aloft locations. A major challenge for perching is to build a lightweight mechanism that can be easily mounted on a MAV, allowing it to perch (attach and de ...

2010