Related papers: Evolving Robots on Easy Mode: Towards a Variable C…
Sprawling locomotion in vertebrates, particularly salamanders, demonstrates how body undulation and spinal mobility enhance stability, maneuverability, and adaptability across complex terrains. While prior work has separately explored…
The development of robot control programs is a complex task. Many robots are different in their electrical and mechanical structure which is also reflected in the software. Specific robot software environments support the program…
Autonomous wheeled-legged robots have the potential to transform logistics systems, improving operational efficiency and adaptability in urban environments. Navigating urban environments, however, poses unique challenges for robots,…
Real-time adaptation is imperative to the control of robots operating in complex, dynamic environments. Adaptive control laws can endow even nonlinear systems with good trajectory tracking performance, provided that any uncertain dynamics…
Task specialization can lead to simpler robot behaviors and higher efficiency in multi-robot systems. Previous works have shown the emergence of task specialization during evolutionary optimization, focusing on feasibility rather than…
Legged robots are increasingly entering new domains and applications, including search and rescue, inspection, and logistics. However, for such systems to be valuable in real-world scenarios, they must be able to autonomously and robustly…
In this paper we present a reformulation--framed as a constrained optimization problem--of multi-robot tasks which are encoded through a cost function that is to be minimized. The advantages of this approach are multiple. The…
Climbing, crouching, bridging gaps, and walking up stairs are just a few of the advantages that quadruped robots have over wheeled robots, making them more suitable for navigating rough and unstructured terrain. However, executing such…
Recently, work on reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal robots has successfully learned controllers for a variety of dynamic gaits with robust sim-to-real demonstrations. In order to maintain balance, the learned controllers have full…
The safety of mobile robots in dynamic environments is predicated on making sure that they do not collide with obstacles. In support of such safety arguments, we analyze and formally verify a series of increasingly powerful safety…
We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…
The field of physical human-robot interaction has dramatically evolved in the last decades. As a result, the robotic system's requirements have become more challenging, including personalized behavior for different tasks and users. Various…
In intelligent manufacturing, robots are asked to dynamically adapt their behaviours without reducing productivity. Human teaching, where an operator physically interacts with the robot to demonstrate a new task, is a promising strategy to…
This paper introduces a new type of soft continuum robot, called SCoReS, which is capable of self-controlling continuously its curvature at the segment level; in contrast to previous designs which either require external forces or machine…
Recently, learning-based controllers have been shown to push mobile robotic systems to their limits and provide the robustness needed for many real-world applications. However, only classical optimization-based control frameworks offer the…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
For a robot to be both autonomous and collaborative requires the ability to adapt its movement to a variety of external stimuli, whether these come from humans or other robots. Typically, legged robots have oscillation periods explicitly…
The field of evolutionary robotics uses principles of natural evolution to design robots. In this paper, we study the effect of adding a new module inspired by the skeletal muscle to the existing RoboGen framework: the linear actuator.…