Related papers: Virtual Nervous Systems for Self-Assembling Robots…
The system architecture controlling a group of robots is generally set before deployment and can be either centralized or decentralized. This dichotomy is highly constraining, because decentralized systems are typically fully self-organized…
It is true that the "best" neural network is not necessarily the one with the most "brain-like" behavior. Understanding biological intelligence, however, is a fundamental goal for several distinct disciplines. Translating our understanding…
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…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
The Synthetic Nervous System (SNS) is a biologically inspired neural network (NN). Due to its capability of capturing complex mechanisms underlying neural computation, an SNS model is a candidate for building compact and interpretable NN…
Visual Semantic Navigation (VSN) is the ability of a robot to learn visual semantic information for navigating in unseen environments. These VSN models are typically tested in those virtual environments where they are trained, mainly using…
The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm…
Anthropomimetic robots are robots that sense, behave, interact and feel like humans. By this definition, anthropomimetic robots require human-like physical hardware and actuation, but also brain-like control and sensing. The most…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
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,…
This paper applies the principles of Virtual Reality (VR) to robots, rather than living organisms. A simulator, of either physical states or information states, renders outputs to custom displays that fool the robot's sensors. This enables…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
Biological nervous systems are created in a fundamentally different way than current artificial neural networks. Despite its impressive results in a variety of different domains, deep learning often requires considerable engineering effort…
Our recently introduced self-organizing nervous system (SoNS) provides robot swarms with 1) ease of behavior design and 2) global estimation of the swarm configuration and its collective environment, facilitating the implementation of…
Deep reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly popular for robot control algorithms, with the aim for a robot to self-learn useful feature representations from unstructured sensory input leading to the optimal actuation policy. In…
Navigation inside luminal organs is an arduous task that requires non-intuitive coordination between the movement of the operator's hand and the information obtained from the endoscopic video. The development of tools to automate certain…
In this paper we present the next step in our approach to neurobiologically plausible implementation of emotional reactions and behaviors for real-time autonomous robotic systems. The working metaphor we use is the "day" and the "night"…
We present self-organizing control principles for simulated robots actuated by synthetic muscles. Muscles correspond to linear motors exerting force only when contracting, but not when expanding, with joints being actuated by pairs of…
Controlling sensori-motor systems in higher animals or complex robots is a challenging combinatorial problem, because many sensory signals need to be simultaneously coordinated into a broad behavioural spectrum. To rapidly interact with the…
Collective decision-making is an essential capability of large-scale multi-robot systems to establish autonomy on the swarm level. A large portion of literature on collective decision-making in swarm robotics focuses on discrete decisions…