Related papers: Controlling Robot Morphology from Incomplete Measu…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
The design process and complexity of existing safety controls are heavily determined by the geometrical properties of the environment, which affects the proof of convergence, design scalability, performance robustness, and numerical…
Existing approaches for visuomotor robotic control typically require characterizing the robot in advance by calibrating the camera or performing system identification. We propose MAVRIC, an approach that works with minimal prior knowledge…
Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…
We present a novel vision-based control method to make a group of ground mobile robots achieve a specified formation shape with unspecified size. Our approach uses multiple aerial control units equipped with downward-facing cameras, each…
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…
Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…
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…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
The present paper aims at analyzing the topological content of the complex trajectories that weeder-autonomous robots follow in operation. We will prove that the topological descriptors of these trajectories are affected by the robot…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
Loops are pervasive in robotics problems, appearing in mapping and localization, where one is interested in finding loop closure constraints to better approximate robot poses or other estimated quantities, as well as planning and…
Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…
Nowadays, there are few unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of flying, walking and grasping. A drone with all these functionalities can significantly improve its performance in complex tasks such as monitoring and exploring different…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…
Morphological computing, the use of the physical design of a robot to ease the realization of a given task has been proven to be a relevant concept in the context of swarm robotics. Here we demonstrate both experimentally and numerically,…
A significant problem in designing mobile robot control systems involves coping with the uncertainty that arises in moving about in an unknown or partially unknown environment and relying on noisy or ambiguous sensor data to acquire…
Moving a human body or a large and bulky object can require the strength of whole arm manipulation (WAM). This type of manipulation places the load on the robot's arms and relies on global properties of the interaction to succeed---rather…
This work proposes a safety-critical local reactive controller that enables the robot to navigate in unknown and cluttered environments. In particular, the trajectory tracking task is formulated as a constrained polynomial optimization…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…