Related papers: NMODE --- Neuro-MODule Evolution
Pedestrian motion prediction is a fundamental task for autonomous robots and vehicles to operate safely. In recent years many complex approaches based on neural networks have been proposed to address this problem. In this work we show that…
Developmental changes in body morphology profoundly shape locomotion in animals, yet artificial agents and robots are typically trained under static physical parameters. Inspired by ontogenetic scaling of muscle power in biology, we propose…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
We investigate the use of prior knowledge of human and animal movement to learn reusable locomotion skills for real legged robots. Our approach builds upon previous work on imitating human or dog Motion Capture (MoCap) data to learn a…
Humanoid robots are well suited for human habitats due to their morphological similarity, but developing controllers for them is a challenging task that involves multiple sub-problems, such as control, planning and perception. In this…
To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…
Despite the recent successes in robotic locomotion control, the design of robot relies heavily on human engineering. Automatic robot design has been a long studied subject, but the recent progress has been slowed due to the large…
In complex systems, we often observe complex global behavior emerge from a collection of agents interacting with each other in their environment, with each individual agent acting only on locally available information, without knowing the…
Metabolic networks consist of linked functional components, or modules. The mechanism underlying metabolic network modularity is of great interest not only to researchers of basic science but also to those in fields of engineering. Previous…
Understanding how the dynamics in biological and artificial neural networks implement the computations required for a task is a salient open question in machine learning and neuroscience. In particular, computations requiring complex memory…
Many prediction problems, such as those that arise in the context of robotics, have a simplifying underlying structure that, if known, could accelerate learning. In this paper, we present a strategy for learning a set of neural network…
Complex networks serve as abstract models for understanding real-world complex systems and provide frameworks for studying structured dynamical systems. This article addresses limitations in current studies on the exploration of individual…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
The field of evolutionary robotics uses principles of natural evolution to design robots. In this paper, we study the effect of adding a new module inspired by the skeletal muscle to the existing RoboGen framework: the linear actuator.…
Existing Continual Learning (CL) approaches have focused on addressing catastrophic forgetting by leveraging regularization methods, replay buffers, and task-specific components. However, realistic CL solutions must be shaped not only by…
Inspired by animals that co-adapt their brain and body to interact with the environment, we present a tendon-driven and over-actuated (i.e., n joint, n+1 actuators) bipedal robot that (i) exploits its backdrivable mechanical properties to…
Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a…
Animals use limbs for both locomotion and manipulation. We aim to equip quadruped robots with similar versatility. This work introduces a system that enables quadruped robots to interact with objects using their legs, inspired by…
The fields of neural computation and artificial neural networks have developed much in the last decades. Most of the works in these fields focus on implementing and/or learning discrete functions or behavior. However, technical, physical,…
Animals (especially humans) have an amazing ability to learn new tasks quickly, and switch between them flexibly. How brains support this ability is largely unknown, both neuroscientifically and algorithmically. One reasonable supposition…