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The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…

Operations in hazardous environments put humans, animals, and machines at high risk for physically damaging consequences. In contrast to humans and animals, quadruped robots cannot naturally identify and adjust their locomotion to a…

The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…

Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting on precisely-targeted cells in biological tissues. Some tasks may benefit from robots that change shape, such as elongating to improve chemical gradient…

Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…

Robot manipulation is increasingly poised to interact with humans in co-shared workspaces. Despite increasingly robust manipulation and control algorithms, failure modes continue to exist whenever models do not capture the dynamics of the…

Large demand for robotics and automation has been reflected in the sanding works, as current manual operations are labor-intensive, without consistent quality, and also subject to safety and health issues. While several machines have been…

Adaptive falling and recovery skills greatly extend the applicability of robot deployments. In the case of legged mobile manipulators, the robot arm could adaptively stop the fall and assist the recovery. Prior works on falling and recovery…

To maintain full autonomy, autonomous robotic systems must have the ability to self-repair. Self-repairing via compensatory mechanisms appears in nature: for example, some fish can lose even 76% of their propulsive surface without loss of…

Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing precision…

Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…

If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…

A hyper-redundant robotic arm is a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, capable of executing tasks in cluttered environments where robotic arms with fewer degrees of freedom are unable to operate. This paper introduces a new method for…

This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…

Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…

Quadrupedal robots have emerged as a cutting-edge platform for assisting humans, finding applications in tasks related to inspection and exploration in remote areas. Nevertheless, their floating base structure renders them susceptible to…

Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…

Accurate shape reconstruction is essential for precise control and reliable operation of soft robots. Compared to sensor-based approaches, vision-based methods offer advantages in cost, simplicity, and ease of deployment. However, existing…

Animals have remarkable abilities to adapt locomotion to different terrains and tasks. However, robots trained by means of reinforcement learning are typically able to solve only a single task and a transferred policy is usually inferior to…