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The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot…
Robots in real-world environments continuously engage with multiple users and encounter changes that lead to unexpected conflicts in fulfilling user requests. Recent technical advancements (e.g., large-language models (LLMs), program…
The ability to recover from a fall is an essential feature for a legged robot to navigate in challenging environments robustly. Until today, there has been very little progress on this topic. Current solutions mostly build upon…
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…
The ability to recover from an unexpected external perturbation is a fundamental motor skill in bipedal locomotion. An effective response includes the ability to not just recover balance and maintain stability but also to fall in a safe…
Automatically detecting and recovering from failures is an important but challenging problem for autonomous robots. Most of the recent work on learning to plan from demonstrations lacks the ability to detect and recover from errors in the…
Quadruped robots have strong adaptability to extreme environments but may also experience faults. Once these faults occur, robots must be repaired before returning to the task, reducing their practical feasibility. One prevalent concern…
Surface cracks in infrastructure can lead to severe deterioration and expensive maintenance if not efficiently repaired. Manual repair methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and imprecise. While advancements in robotic perception and…
Adaptive recovery from fall incidents are essential skills for the practical deployment of wheeled-legged robots, which uniquely combine the agility of legs with the speed of wheels for rapid recovery. However, traditional methods relying…
Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
The paper presents a new formal way of modeling and designing reconfigurable robots, in which case the robots are allowed to reconfigure not only structurally but also functionally. We call such kind of robots "self-evolvable", which have…
In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…
Integrating Large Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains:…
Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
The paper focuses on collision-inclusive motion planning for impact-resilient mobile robots. We propose a new deformation recovery and replanning strategy to handle collisions that may occur at run-time. Contrary to collision avoidance…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
Robot accidents are inevitable. Although rare, they have been happening since assembly-line robots were first introduced in the 1960s. But a new generation of social robots are now becoming commonplace. Often with sophisticated embedded…
Existing shape estimation methods for deformable object manipulation suffer from the drawbacks of being off-line, model dependent, noise-sensitive or occlusion-sensitive, and thus are not appropriate for manipulation tasks requiring high…