About Robotics
What is a robot?
A robot is a programmable machine that can sense its environment, process information, and perform physical actions. Robots can range from industrial arms and mobile machines to soft devices, medical tools, and systems designed for space exploration.
Every robot brings together multiple areas of engineering. Sensors provide information about the robot and its surroundings, control systems determine how it should respond, and mechanical components produce motion and interact with the world.
Why use compliance in robotics?
Many conventional robots are built from rigid links connected by bearings, hinges, and other mechanical joints. These systems can produce accurate motion, but they may also require many individual parts.
Compliant mechanisms create motion through the controlled bending or deformation of flexible components. When compliance is intentionally designed into a robot, part of the machine’s structure can also serve as its joints, springs, or motion-guiding elements.
At the BYU Compliant Mechanisms and Robotics Group, we explore how rigid and flexible components can work together to produce useful robotic motion.
Why use compliance in robotics?
Using compliant mechanisms in robotics can offer several benefits:
- Adaptability: Flexible structures can conform to objects and environments with complex or changing shapes.
- Fewer components: A compliant mechanism may replace assemblies containing bearings, springs, fasteners, and separate joints.
- Lower weight: Reducing the number of components can produce lighter robotic systems.
- Reduced friction and wear: Motion created by material deformation can eliminate some sliding and rolling interfaces.
- Energy storage: Flexible elements can store and release elastic energy as part of a robot’s movement.
- Safer interaction: Carefully designed compliance can help robots respond more gently to contact with people or unfamiliar objects.
- Compact deployment: Flexible and inflatable structures can enable robots to pack into a small volume and expand when needed.
These advantages are not automatic. Effective compliant robots require careful choices about geometry, materials, actuation, sensing, and control.
Our approach
CMR researchers combine analytical models, computational design tools, rapid prototyping, and physical testing. We study how a structure will bend, how stresses will be distributed, and how those deformations can produce a desired motion.
Prototypes allow researchers to compare theoretical predictions with real-world behavior. The results help refine both the physical design and the methods used to model it.
Our robotics work may include compliant joints, manipulators, grippers, soft or inflatable structures, deployable systems, and other devices that benefit from carefully controlled flexibility.
Publications in Robotics
A Virtual-Center Spherical Joint for Reconfigurable Truss Robot Systems — Adam Rose, Ivyann O. Running, Eli Francom, Simon Charles, Bryce Parkinson, Larry Howell, Nathan Usevitch. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Vol. 13. DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2026.1968425.
A Thickness-Invariant Origami Robot With Integrated Actuation and Multimodal Locomotion — Davis Wing, Sam Bridge, William Bowler, Nathan Usevitch, Larry Howell. Advanced Science, e77418. DOI: 10.1002/advs.77418.
Design and Control of Isoperimetric Robot From Tape Springs
Jackson Hancey, Fisk Lundgreen, Nathan S. Usevitch
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 97–104
2026
Triangle-Decomposable Graphs for Isoperimetric Robots
Nathan S. Usevitch, Isaac Weaver, James Usevitch
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 10, No. 12, pp. 12716–12723
2025
Modular Isoperimetric Soft Robotic Truss for Lunar Applications
Mihai Stanciu, Isaac Weaver, Adam Rose, James Wade, Kaden Paxton, Chris Paul, Spencer Stowell, Nathan S. Usevitch
Preprint
2026