Related papers: Measuring information transfer in a soft robotic a…

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…

Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in…

Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…

We report on a data-driven investigation aimed at understanding the dynamics of message spreading in a real-world dynamical network of human proximity. We use data collected by means of a proximity-sensing network of wearable sensors that…

Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is…

The influence of individual differences on the perception and evaluation of interactions with robots has been researched for decades. Some human demographic characteristics have been shown to affect how individuals perceive interactions…

This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…

This paper presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot…

Humans learn about objects via interaction and using multiple perceptions, such as vision, sound, and touch. While vision can provide information about an object's appearance, non-visual sensors, such as audio and haptics, can provide…

Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…

The predictive functions that permit humans to infer their body state by sensorimotor integration are critical to perform safe interaction in complex environments. These functions are adaptive and robust to non-linear actuators and noisy…

Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…

As human-robot collaboration is becoming more widespread, there is a need for a more natural way of communicating with the robot. This includes combining data from several modalities together with the context of the situation and background…

Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…

Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for…

Robotic surface consisting of many actuators can change shape to perform tasks, such as facilitating human-machine interactions and transporting objects. Increasing the number of actuators can enhance the robot's capacity, but controlling…

Mobile robots, performing long-term manipulation activities in human environments, have to perceive a wide variety of objects possessing very different visual characteristics and need to reliably keep track of these throughout the execution…

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…

Semi-autonomous telerobotic systems allow both humans and robots to exploit their strengths, while enabling personalized execution of a task. However, for new soft robots with degrees of freedom dissimilar to those of human operators, it is…

Having the ability to estimate an object's properties through interaction will enable robots to manipulate novel objects. Object's dynamics, specifically the friction and inertial parameters have only been estimated in a lab environment…