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Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
On-orbit close proximity operations involve robotic spacecraft maneuvering and making decisions for a growing number of mission scenarios demanding autonomy, including on-orbit assembly, repair, and astronaut assistance. Of these scenarios,…
Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…
In this work, we explore emergent behaviors by swarms of anonymous, homogeneous, non-communicating, reactive robots that do not know their global position and have limited relative sensing. We introduce a novel method that enables such…
One of the most important promises of decentralized systems is scalability, which is often assumed to be present in robot swarm systems without being contested. Simple limitations, such as movement congestion and communication conflicts,…
Assembly of multi-part physical structures is both a valuable end product for autonomous robotics, as well as a valuable diagnostic task for open-ended training of embodied intelligent agents. We introduce a naturalistic physics-based…
Notwithstanding the tremendous progress that is taking place in spoken language technology, effective speech-based human-robot interaction still raises a number of important challenges. Not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
This study presents a system integration approach for planning schedules, sequences, tasks, and motions for reconfigurable robots to automatically disassemble constrained structures in a non-destructive manner. Such systems must adapt their…
Industrial robots can solve very complex tasks in controlled environments, but modern applications require robots able to operate in unpredictable surroundings as well. An increasingly popular reactive policy architecture in robotics is…
We consider the configuration formation problem in modular robotic systems where a set of singleton modules that are spatially distributed in an environment are required to assume appropriate positions so that they can configure into a new,…
Swarm robotic systems utilize collective behaviour to achieve goals that might be too complex for a lone entity, but become attainable with localized communication and collective decision making. In this paper, a behaviour-based distributed…
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…
In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…
The development of human-robot collaboration has the ability to improve manufacturing system performance by leveraging the unique strengths of both humans and robots. On the shop floor, human operators contribute with their adaptability and…
Robot swarms offer the potential to bring several advantages to the real-world applications but deploying them presents challenges in ensuring feasibility across diverse environments. Assessing the feasibility of new tasks for swarms is…
We study the power of uncontrolled random molecular movement in the nubot model of self-assembly. The nubot model is an asynchronous nondeterministic cellular automaton augmented with rigid-body movement rules (push/pull, deterministically…
Assembling parts into an object is a combinatorial problem that arises in a variety of contexts in the real world and involves numerous applications in science and engineering. Previous related work tackles limited cases with identical unit…
Swarm robots, inspired by the emergence of animal herds, are robots that assemble a large number of modules and self-organize themselves to form specific morphologies and exhibit specific functions. These modular robots perform relatively…