Related papers: Interactive Co-Design of Form and Function for Leg…

Recent works explore collaboration between humans and teams of robots. These approaches make sense if the human is already working with the robot team; but how should robots encourage nearby humans to join their teams in the first place?…

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the use of robotic technology at home. A number of service robots appeared on the market, supporting customers in the execution of everyday tasks. Roughly at the same time, consumer…

Co-design optimization strategies usually rely on simplified robot models extracted from CAD. While these models are useful for optimizing geometrical and inertial parameters for robot control, they might overlook important details…

This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…

Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…

Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…

For decades, robotics researchers have pursued various tasks for multi-robot systems, from cooperative manipulation to search and rescue. These tasks are multi-robot extensions of classical robotic tasks and often optimized on dimensions…

Replicating and surpassing the autonomy of natural organisms remains a long-standing goal in robotics. Yet most robotic systems have their structure, materials, and control designed separately, in sharp contrast to the co-evolution in…

As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…

We introduce a novel co-design method for autonomous moving agents' shape attributes and locomotion by combining deep reinforcement learning and evolution with user control. Our main inspiration comes from evolution, which has led to wide…

Optimal control approaches in combination with trajectory optimization have recently proven to be a promising control strategy for legged robots. Computationally efficient and robust algorithms were derived using simplified models of the…

For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…

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…

Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…

Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…

Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…

Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience…

We present parametric trajectory optimization, a method for simultaneously computing physical parameters, actuation requirements, and robot motions for more efficient robot designs. In this scheme, robot dimensions, masses, and other…

Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…

Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…