Related papers: Adapting Low-Cost Platforms for Robotics Research
Three challenges limit the progress of robot learning research: robots are expensive (few labs can participate), everyone uses different robots (findings do not generalize across labs), and we lack internet-scale robotics data. We take on…
Reinforcement learning methods can achieve significant performance but require a large amount of training data collected on the same robotic platform. A policy trained with expensive data is rendered useless after making even a minor change…
Autonomous navigation systems based on computer vision sensors often require sophisticated robotics platforms which are very expensive. This poses a barrier for the implementation and testing of complex localization, mapping, and navigation…
This paper describes the Pogobot, an open-source platform specifically designed for research at the interface of swarm robotics and active matter. Pogobot features vibration-based or wheel-based locomotion, fast infrared communication, and…
The allure of lunar surface exploration and development has recently captured widespread global attention. Robots have proved to be indispensable for exploring uncharted terrains, uncovering and leveraging local resources, and facilitating…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is…
Software bots operating in multiple virtual digital platforms must understand the platforms' affordances and behave like human users. Platform affordances or features differ from one application platform to another or through a life cycle,…
Developing Internet of Things (IoT) systems has to cope with several challenges mainly because of the heterogeneity of the involved sub-systems and components. With the aim of conceiving languages and tools supporting the development of IoT…
The rise of deep learning has caused a paradigm shift in robotics research, favoring methods that require large amounts of data. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to generate such data sets on a physical platform. Therefore,…
Developing adaptable, extensible, and accurate task bots with minimal or zero human intervention is a significant challenge in dialog research. This thesis examines the obstacles and potential solutions for creating such bots, focusing on…
The current state of electronic component miniaturization coupled with the increasing efficiency in hardware and software allow the development of smaller and compact robotic systems. The convenience of using these small, simple, yet…
Safety concerns have risen as robots become more integrated into our daily lives and continue to interact closely with humans. One of the most crucial safety priorities is preventing collisions between robots and people walking nearby.…
As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…
Imitation based robot learning has recently gained significant attention in the robotics field due to its theoretical potential for transferability and generalizability. However, it remains notoriously costly, both in terms of hardware and…
Context: Competitions for self-driving cars facilitated the development and research in the domain of autonomous vehicles towards potential solutions for the future mobility. Objective: Miniature vehicles can bridge the gap between…
Learning-based robotics research driven by data demands a new approach to robot hardware design-one that serves as both a platform for policy execution and a tool for embodied data collection to train policies. We introduce ToddlerBot, a…
Accessibility is one of the most important features in the design of robots and their interfaces. This thesis proposes methods that improve the accessibility of robots for three different target audiences: consumers, researchers, and…
We describe a software framework and a hardware platform used in tandem for the design and analysis of robot autonomy algorithms in simulation and reality. The software, which is open source, containerized, and operating system (OS)…