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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…

All biological systems are subject to perturbations: due to thermal fluctuations, external environments, or mutations. Yet, while biological systems are composed of thousands of interacting components, recent high-throughput experiments…

Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…

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.…

A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…

Evolutionary robot systems offer two principal advantages: an advanced way of developing robots through evolutionary optimization and a special research platform to conduct what-if experiments regarding questions about evolution. Our study…

Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…

Multi-level evolution is a bottom-up robotic design paradigm which decomposes the design problem into layered sub-tasks that involve concurrent search for appropriate materials, component geometry and overall morphology. Each of the three…

Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…

Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt.…

When simulating soft robots, both their morphology and their controllers play important roles in task performance. This paper introduces a new method to co-evolve these two components in the same process. We do that by using the hyperNEAT…

This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…

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…

The co-optimization of a robot's body and brain presents a coupled challenge: the morphology constrains which control strategies are effective, while the control determines how well the morphology performs. To address this, we combine…

We propose to make the physical characteristics of a robot oscillate while it learns to improve its behavioral performance. We consider quantities such as mass, actuator strength, and size that are usually fixed in a robot, and show that…

Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…

Robotic hardware designs are becoming more complex as the variety and number of on-board sensors increase and as greater computational power is provided in ever-smaller packages on-board robots. These advances in hardware, however, do not…

Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…

The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, and interaction.…