Related papers: Robots that can adapt like animals
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
Ensuring safe and efficient operation of collaborative robots in human environments is challenging, especially in dynamic settings where both obstacle motion and tasks change over time. Current robot controllers typically assume full…
Successful real-world deployment of legged robots would require them to adapt in real-time to unseen scenarios like changing terrains, changing payloads, wear and tear. This paper presents Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA) algorithm to solve…
Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…
While humans are aware of their body and capabilities, robots are not. To address this, we present in this paper a neural network architecture that enables a dual-arm robot to get a sense of itself in an environment. Our approach is…
Intelligent robots need to generate and execute plans. In order to deal with the complexity of real environments, planning makes some assumptions about the world. When executing plans, the assumptions are usually not met. Most works have…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive,…
The ongoing deep learning revolution has allowed computers to outclass humans in various games and perceive features imperceptible to humans during classification tasks. Current machine learning techniques have clearly distinguished…
Humans can perform parkour by traversing obstacles in a highly dynamic fashion requiring precise eye-muscle coordination and movement. Getting robots to do the same task requires overcoming similar challenges. Classically, this is done by…
Mobile robots, especially those driving outdoors and in unstructured terrain, sometimes suffer from failures and errors in locomotion, like unevenly pressurized or flat tires, loose axes or de-tracked tracks. Those are errors that go…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
In human-robot collaboration, robot errors are inevitable -- damaging user trust, willingness to work together, and task performance. Prior work has shown that people naturally respond to robot errors socially and that in social…
Industrial manipulators do not collapse under their own weight when powered off due to the friction in their joints. Although these mechanism are effective for stiff position control of pick-and-place, they are inappropriate for legged…
If robots are ever to achieve autonomous motion comparable to that exhibited by animals, they must acquire the ability to quickly recover motor behaviors when damage, malfunction, or environmental conditions compromise their ability to move…
The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…