Related papers: NMODE --- Neuro-MODule Evolution
Dung beetles impressively coordinate their six legs simultaneously to effectively roll large dung balls. They are also capable of rolling dung balls varying in the weight on different terrains. The mechanisms underlying how their motor…
Evolution gave rise to creatures that are arguably more sophisticated than the greatest human-designed systems. This feat has inspired computer scientists since the advent of computing and led to optimization tools that can evolve complex…
Learning high-level navigation behaviors has important implications: it enables robots to build compact visual memory for repeating demonstrations and to build sparse topological maps for planning in novel environments. Existing approaches…
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this suggests an approach driven by evolutionary metaphor. On the…
Spatially-embedded complex networks, such as nervous systems, the Internet and transportation networks, generally have non-trivial topological patterns of connections combined with nearly minimal wiring costs. However the growth rules…
Natural and lifelike locomotion remains a fundamental challenge for humanoid robots to interact with human society. However, previous methods either neglect motion naturalness or rely on unstable and ambiguous style rewards. In this paper,…
Performing agile navigation with four-legged robots is a challenging task due to the highly dynamic motions, contacts with various parts of the robot, and the limited field of view of the perception sensors. In this paper, we propose a…
Wearable assistive robots (WR) for the lower extremity are extensively documented in literature. Various interfaces have been designed to control these devices during gait and balance activities. However, achieving seamless and intuitive…
In this chapter we will highlight our experimental studies on natural human walking analysis and introduce a biologically inspired design for simple bipedal locomotion system of humanoid robots. Inspiration comes directly from human walking…
High-throughput techniques are leading to an explosive growth in the size of biological databases and creating the opportunity to revolutionize our understanding of life and disease. Interpretation of these data remains, however, a major…
In modular robotics, modules can be reconfigured to change the morphology of the robot, making it able to adapt for specific tasks. However, optimizing both the body and control is a difficult challenge due to the intricate relationship…
Robot multimodal locomotion encompasses the ability to transition between walking and flying, representing a significant challenge in robotics. This work presents an approach that enables automatic smooth transitions between legged and…
Developing a framework for the locomotion of a six-legged robot or a hexapod is a complex task that has extensive hardware and computational requirements. In this paper, we present a bio-inspired framework for the locomotion of a hexapod.…
This work aims to develop a resource-efficient solution for obstacle-avoiding tracking control of a planar snake robot in a densely cluttered environment with obstacles. Particularly, Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) has been…
This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive…
Learned locomotion policies can rapidly adapt to diverse environments similar to those experienced during training but lack a mechanism for fast tuning when they fail in an out-of-distribution test environment. This necessitates a slow and…
In this work, we demonstrate robust walking in the bipedal robot Digit on uneven terrains by just learning a single linear policy. In particular, we propose a new control pipeline, wherein the high-level trajectory modulator shapes the…
Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces…
Prediction tasks over nodes and edges in networks require careful effort in engineering features used by learning algorithms. Recent research in the broader field of representation learning has led to significant progress in automating…
Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…