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Design research lab studying physical robot interaction

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Underwater & Marine Systems

Systems designed for marine and underwater environments face special challenges for real-world adoption. We study how the fluid dynamics of operating underwater changes dexterous manipulation, and test novel robotic mechanisms in the field.

Current researchers (August 2023): All graduate students have graduated.

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Designing skin to counteract lubrication

Shoes and tires have treads to reduce slipping, when robot fingers should too. However, the size and scale of these milliscale surface features matters. We found an optimal design for pinching lubricated flat plates.

Publications:

Milliscale features increase friction of soft skin in lubricated contact

Enhanced grasping with fingertip suction flow

The Ocean One hands: An adaptive design for robust marine manipulation

Tunable Contact Conditions and Grasp Hydrodynamics Using Gentle Fingertip Suction

Tactile sensing based on fingertip suction flow for submerged dexterous manipulation

Suction helps in a pinch: Improving underwater manipulation with gentle suction flow

A compliant underactuated hand with suction flow for underwater mobile manipulation

Fish inspired manipulation

Fish employ whole body movement for manipulation. In our first look at this, we studied how a tail-driven head flick enables tearing of soft materials off of mixed surfaces.

Bioinspired tearing manipulation with a robotic fish

Sampling coral reefs

Coral reefs are severely threatened, with an estimated loss of 50% of corals globally over the past three decades. Current methods of evaluating reef health are insufficient in measuring key species-level changes for scientists to interpret. Studies are in part limited by a lack of technology suitable for collecting large numbers of tissue samples quickly, especially at larger depths. The goal is to enable an affordable remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to effectively collect coral tissue samples for large-scale genetic studies.

 

Gripper Design with Rotation-Constrained Teeth for Mobile Manipulation of Hard, Plating Corals with Human-Portable ROVs

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