Related papers: Cable-Driven Robots with Wireless Control Capabili…
In this paper we present an open source educational robot, designed both to engage children in an affective and social interaction, and to be programmable also in its social and affective behaviour. Indeed the robot, in addition to classic…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
How are robots becoming smarter at interacting with their surroundings? Recent advances have reshaped how robots use tactile sensing to perceive and engage with the world. Tactile sensing is a game-changer, allowing robots to embed…
Seemingly we are not so far from Star Trek's food replicator. Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming an integral part of both science and education, offering not only automation of processes but also the dynamic creation of…
Arduino microcontrollers are electronic devices that can be used in physics experiments, and they are both affordable and readily available in comparison to other experimental sets. Students in high school and college can acquire valuable…
Laboratory robotics offer the capability to conduct experiments with a high degree of precision and reproducibility, with the potential to transform scientific research. Trivial and repeatable tasks; e.g., sample transportation for analysis…
This paper introduces the task of {\em Planar Robot Casting (PRC)}: where one planar motion of a robot arm holding one end of a cable causes the other end to slide across the plane toward a desired target. PRC allows the cable to reach…
The vast majority of visual animals actively control their eyes, heads, and/or bodies to direct their gaze toward different parts of their environment. In contrast, recent applications of reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation…
Collaborative robots are expected to be able to work alongside humans and in some cases directly replace existing human workers, thus effectively responding to rapid assembly line changes. Current methods for programming contact-rich tasks,…
This study presents mechatronic design, dynamic modeling, simulations and real-time control experiments of a new movable scaffolding system. The proposed system consists of a 3 degrees-of-freedom movable platform, which can be positioned on…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
According to the American Heritage Dictionary [1],Robotics is the science or study of the technology associated with the design, fabrication, theory, and application of Robots. The term Hoverbot is also often used to refer to sophisticated…
The use of robots in education represents a challenge for teachers and a fixed vision of what robots can do for students. This paper presents the development of Sthymuli, a static educational robot designed to explore new classroom…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
This work explores a group learning scenario with an autonomous empathic robot. We address two research questions: (1) Can an autonomous robot designed with empathic competencies foster collaborative learning in a group context? (2) Can an…
University laboratories deliver unique hands-on experimentation for STEM students but often lack state-of-the-art equipment and provide limited access to their equipment. The University of Texas Cloud Laboratory provides remote access to a…
We are developing a system for human-robot communication that enables people to communicate with robots in a natural way and is focused on solving problems in a shared space. Our strategy for developing this system is fundamentally…
Imitation learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm in robot manipulation, yet its generalization capability remains constrained by object-specific dependencies in limited expert demonstrations. To address this challenge, we propose…
Simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion tasks, yet direct real-world RL from scratch or adapting from pretrained policies remains rare, limiting the full potential of humanoid robots.…
Learning from human demonstration is an effective approach for learning complex manipulation skills. However, existing approaches heavily focus on learning from passive human demonstration data for its simplicity in data collection.…