Related papers: Self-Modifying Morphology Experiments with DyRET: …
Robots are used in more and more complex environments, and are expected to be able to adapt to changes and unknown situations. The easiest and quickest way to adapt is to change the control system of the robot, but for increasingly complex…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
The ability to modify morphology in response to environmental changes represents a highly advantageous feature in biological organisms, facilitating their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. While some robots have the capability…
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…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Integrating Large Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains:…
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…
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…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Biped robots usually adopt feet with a rigid structure that simplifies walking on flat grounds and yet hinders ground adaptation in unstructured environments, thus jeopardizing stability. We recently explored in the SoftFoot the idea of…
Robots are traditionally bounded by a fixed embodiment during their operational lifetime, which limits their ability to adapt to their surroundings. Co-optimizing control and morphology of a robot, however, is often inefficient due to the…
Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
Flagellated microorganisms can swim at low Reynolds numbers and adapt to changes in their environment. Specifically, the flagella can switch their shapes or modes through gene expression. In the past decade, efforts have been made to…