Related papers: Embodied robots driven by self-organized environme…
When modeling complex robot systems such as branched robots, whose kinematic structures are a tree, current techniques often require modeling the whole structure from scratch, even when partial models for the branches are available. This…
In this paper, we consider the problem of collectively exploring unknown and dynamic environments with a decentralized heterogeneous multi-robot system consisting of multiple units of two variants of a miniature robot. The first variant-a…
Social institutions are systems of shared norms and rules that regulate people's behaviors, often emerging without external enforcement. They provide criteria to distinguish cooperation from defection and establish rules to sustain…
We present a simple discrete model for the non-linear spatial interaction of different kinds of ``subpopulations'' composed of identical moving entities like particles, bacteria, individuals, etc. The model allows to mimic a variety of…
Self-assembly of modular robotic systems enables the construction of complex robotic configurations to adapt to different tasks. This paper presents a framework for SMORES types of modular robots to efficiently self-assemble into tree…
Distributed networks of brain areas interact with one another in a time-varying fashion to enable complex cognitive and sensorimotor functions. Here we use novel network analysis algorithms to test the recruitment and integration of…
The system architecture controlling a group of robots is generally set before deployment and can be either centralized or decentralized. This dichotomy is highly constraining, because decentralized systems are typically fully self-organized…
A good organization model of multiple mobile robot should be able to improve the efficiency of the system, reduce the complication of robot interactions, and detract the difficulty of computation. From the sociology aspect of topology,…
A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the…
Inspired by spiking neural feedback, we propose a spiking controller for efficient locomotion in a soft robotic crawler. Its bistability, akin to neural fast positive feedback, combined with a sensorimotor slow negative feedback loop,…
Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…
We present experimental results on the single file motion of a group of robots interacting with each other through position sensors. We successfully replicate the fundamental diagram typical of these systems, with a transition from free…
When researching robot swarms, many studies observe complex group behavior emerging from the individual agents' simple local actions. However, the task of learning an individual policy to produce a desired group behavior remains a…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
This paper introduces a distributed leaderless swarm formation control framework to address the problem of collectively driving a swarm of robots to track a time-varying formation. The swarm's formation is captured by the trajectory of an…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
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…
Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…