Underwater robotic grasping is difficult due to degraded, highly variable imagery and the expense of collecting diverse underwater demonstrations. We introduce a system that (i) autonomously collects successful underwater grasp demonstrations via a self-supervised data collection pipeline and (ii) transfers grasp knowledge from on-land human demonstrations through a depth-based affordance representation that bridges the on-land-to-underwater domain gap and is robust to lighting and color shift.

We develop a compact long-reach manipulator with a deployable composite boom designed for autonomous cable outfitting and construction tasks on the lunar surface. We employ control strategies to mitigate deflection, vibration, and blossoming effects inherent to the deployable structure. Experiments demonstrate endpoint accuracy under 15 mm for boom lengths up to 1.8 m, enabling fine manipulation across large workspaces.

GIRAF pairs an ANYmal D quadruped with a long-reach deployable manipulator, using a deployable joint to extend reach beyond 3 m while preserving useful payload capacity. This suits construction, inspection, and maintenance tasks across large structures in field and space environments, such as cable routing, large-surface cleaning, and servicing distributed lunar infrastructure. We present the system design, an optimization-based formulation for robust mobile manipulation that substantially reduces required base motions, and initial hardware deployments.

Harbor seals track hydrodynamic trails with their vibrissae, sensing moving targets passively in dark or turbid water. We build compact fiber Bragg grating whiskers with the same wavy taper and elliptical cross-section, on a superelastic NiTi core in a urethane shell that recovers from large underwater deflections. Towing tests show a monotonic response from 0.1 to 0.6 m/s with strongly suppressed self-induced oscillation, and a single front-mounted whisker let a small underwater robot pick the correct branch in 17 of 20 trials from whisker signals alone.

A small mobile robot equipped with a long-reach manipulator is studied for large-scale cleaning of lunar solar arrays. Endpoint force sensing and a velocity-based admittance control policy enables stable contact regulation (~2N), demonstrating autonomous maintenance capabilities.