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Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
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…
In this work, we investigate swarm self-clustering, where robots autonomously organize into spatially coherent groups using only local sensing and decision-making, without external commands, global positioning, or inter-robot communication.…
While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
We propose a general framework for solving inverse self-assembly problems, i.e. designing interactions between elementary units such that they assemble spontaneously into a predetermined structure. Our approach uses patchy particles as…
Multi-robot formation control enables robots to cooperate as a working group in completing complex tasks, which has been widely used in both civilian and military scenarios. Before moving to reach a given formation, each robot should choose…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
The challenge of robotic reproduction -- making of new robots by recombining two existing ones -- has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: producing an…
Today's distributed and pervasive computing addresses large-scale cyber-physical ecosystems, characterised by dense and large networks of devices capable of computation, communication and interaction with the environment and people. While…
Robotic systems that are intended to augment human capabilities commonly require the use of semi-autonomous control and artificial sensing, while at the same time aiming to empower the user to make decisions and take actions. This work…
Roboticists are trying to replicate animal behavior in artificial systems. Yet, quantitative bounds on capacity of a moving platform (natural or artificial) to express information in the environment are not known. This paper presents a…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
An open research question has been whether a single human can supervise a true heterogeneous swarm of robots completing tasks in real world environments. A general concern is whether or not the human's workload will be taxed to the breaking…
In this paper we present algorithms for collective construction systems in which a large number of autonomous mobile robots trans- port modular building elements to construct a desired structure. We focus on building block structures…
In Human-Robot Collaboration, the robot operates in a highly dynamic environment. Thus, it is pivotal to guarantee the robust stability of the system during the interaction but also a high flexibility of the robot behavior in order to…
Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are…
An important problem in microrobotics is how to control a large group of microrobots with a global control signal. This paper focuses on controlling a large-scale swarm of MicroStressBots with on-board physical finite-state machines. We…
This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent…
Modular Aerial Robotic Systems (MARS) consist of multiple drone units assembled into a single, integrated rigid flying platform. With inherent redundancy, MARS can self-reconfigure into different configurations to mitigate rotor or unit…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…