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Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
This literature review investigates how robots can be used for the maintenance of manmade structures, such as pipes, reinforced concrete decks, and space stations as a sampling of the broad spectrum of robotic non-destructive testing (NDT)…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
Several robot manipulation tasks are extremely sensitive to variations of the physical properties of the manipulated objects. One such task is manipulating objects by using gravity or arm accelerations, increasing the importance of mass,…
Autonomous drones must often respond to sudden events, such as alarms, faults, or unexpected changes in their environment, that require immediate and adaptive decision-making. Traditional approaches rely on safety engineers hand-coding…
This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…
Robots are expected to manipulate objects in a safe and dexterous way. For example, washing dishes is a dexterous operation that involves scrubbing the dishes with a sponge and rinsing them with water. It is necessary to learn it safely…
Self-adaptive parameters are increasingly used in the field of Evolutionary Robotics, as they allow key evolutionary rates to vary autonomously in a context-sensitive manner throughout the optimisation process. A significant limitation to…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Planning trajectories for nonholonomic systems is difficult and computationally expensive. When facing unexpected events, it may therefore be preferable to deform in some way the initially planned trajectory rather than to re-plan entirely…
Animals and robots exist in a physical world and must coordinate their bodies to achieve behavioral objectives. With recent developments in deep reinforcement learning, it is now possible for scientists and engineers to obtain sensorimotor…
Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying…
The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…
We investigate the scenario that a robot needs to reach a designated goal after taking a sequence of appropriate actions in a non-static environment that is partially structured. One application example is to control a marine vehicle to…
Robots deployed at orders of magnitude different size scales, and that retain the same desired behavior at any of those scales, would greatly expand the environments in which the robots could operate. However it is currently not known…
In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based control algorithm for regulating the whole body shape of extensible multisection soft continuum manipulators. Contrary to existing vision-based control algorithms in the literature that…
Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However,…
Continuum and soft robots can leverage complex actuator shapes to take on useful shapes while actuating only a few of their many degrees of freedom. Continuum robots that also grow increase the range of potential shapes that can be actuated…
This paper presents an innovative method for humanoid robots to acquire a comprehensive set of motor skills through reinforcement learning. The approach utilizes an achievement-triggered multi-path reward function rooted in developmental…
Quadruped robots are progressively being integrated into human environments. Despite the growing locomotion capabilities of quadrupedal robots, their interaction with objects in realistic scenes is still limited. While additional robotic…