Related papers: Exploring Mechanically Self-Reconfiguring Robots f…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
We present a system enabling a modular robot to autonomously build structures in order to accomplish high-level tasks. Building structures allows the robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of tasks it can perform. This…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Evolutionary algorithm research and applications began over 50 years ago. Like other artificial intelligence techniques, evolutionary algorithms will likely see increased use and development due to the increased availability of computation,…
In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
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…
Intelligent systems are increasingly part of our everyday lives and have been integrated seamlessly to the point where it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Physical manifestations of those systems on the other hand, in the form…
The development of versatile robots capable of traversing challenging and irregular environments is of increasing interest in the field of robotics, and metameric robots have been identified as a promising solution due to their slender,…
Autonomous vehicles with a self-evolving ability are expected to cope with unknown scenarios in the real-world environment. Take advantage of trial and error mechanism, reinforcement learning is able to self evolve by learning the optimal…
We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…
This paper deals with the classical problem of exploring a ring by a cohort of synchronous robots. We focus on the perpetual version of this problem in which it is required that each node of the ring is visited by a robot infinitely often.…
We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…
We demonstrate how multiagent systems provide useful control techniques for modular self-reconfigurable (metamorphic) robots. Such robots consist of many modules that can move relative to each other, thereby changing the overall shape of…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
In experimental robotics, researchers may face uncertainties in parameters of a robot manipulator that they are working with. This uncertainty may be caused by deviations in the manufacturing process of a manipulator, or changes applied to…
The ability to learn from human demonstration endows robots with the ability to automate various tasks. However, directly learning from human demonstration is challenging since the structure of the human hand can be very different from the…