Related papers: Towards the Targeted Environment-Specific Evolutio…
Evolutionary Robotics and Robot Learning are two fields in robotics that aim to automatically optimize robot designs. The key difference between them lies in what is being optimized and the time scale involved. Evolutionary Robotics is a…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…
Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…
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…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…
Robotic hardware designs are becoming more complex as the variety and number of on-board sensors increase and as greater computational power is provided in ever-smaller packages on-board robots. These advances in hardware, however, do not…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
To generate reliable motion for legged robots through trajectory optimization, it is crucial to simultaneously compute the robot's path and contact sequence, as well as accurately consider the dynamics in the problem formulation. In this…
With the rapid development of the construction industry, issues such as harsh working environments, high-intensity and high-risk tasks, and labor shortages have become increasingly prominent. This drives higher demands for construction…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
In human-robot cooperation, the robot cooperates with humans to accomplish the task together. Existing approaches assume the human has a specific goal during the cooperation, and the robot infers and acts toward it. However, in real-world…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
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…
Robot gait optimization is the task of generating an optimal control trajectory under various internal and external constraints. Given the high dimensions of control space, this problem is particularly challenging for multi-legged robots…
Embodiment co-design aims to optimize a robot's morphology and control policy simultaneously. While prior work has demonstrated its potential for generating environment-adaptive robots, this field still faces persistent challenges in…
In a world designed for legs, quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids have the opportunity to impact emerging robotics applications from logistics, to agriculture, to home assistance. The goal of this survey is to cover the recent progress toward…
This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling an on-orbit assembly mission scenario of a large flexible structure using a multi-arm robot. This methodology accounts for significant changes in inertia and flexibility…