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A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the…
Every robot built to date was predesigned by an external process, prior to deployment. Here we show a robot that actively participates in its own design during its lifetime. Starting from a randomly assembled body, and using only…
Recently, researchers have explored control methods that embrace nonlinear dynamic coupling instead of suppressing it. Such designs leverage dynamical coupling for communication between different parts of the robot. Morphological…
Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…
Taking inspiration from how the brain coordinates multiple learning systems is an appealing strategy to endow robots with more flexibility. One of the expected advantages would be for robots to autonomously switch to the least costly system…
This article takes a step to provide humanoid robots with adaptive morphology abilities. We present a systematic approach for enabling robotic covers to morph their shape, with an overall size fitting the anthropometric dimensions of a…
One of the most intriguing questions in evolution is how organisms exhibit suitable phenotypic variation to rapidly adapt in novel selective environments which is crucial for evolvability. Recent work showed that when selective environments…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete theories of…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to…
Designing soft robots is a complex and iterative process that demands cross-disciplinary expertise in materials science, mechanics, and control, often relying on intuition and extensive experimentation. While foundation models, especially…
Biological systems, with many interacting components, face high-dimensional environmental fluctuations, ranging from diverse nutrient deprivations to toxins, drugs, and physical stresses. Yet, many biological control mechanisms are `simple'…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
An approach to robotics called layered evolution and merging features from the subsumption architecture into evolutionary robotics is presented, and its advantages are discussed. This approach is used to construct a layered controller for a…
In this study, we propose a predictive model composed of a recurrent neural network including parametric bias and stochastic elements, and an environmentally adaptive robot control method including variance minimization using the model.…
It is hard to imagine with the progress in robotics that current approaches are lacking somewhere, yet they will not be applicable to the majority of robots in the near future. We are on the verge of two new transitions that will transform…
This paper addresses the challenge of co-designing morphology and control in soft robots via a novel neural network evolution approach. We propose an innovative method to implicitly dual-encode soft robots, thus facilitating the…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
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…