Related papers: Connected Assembly and Reconfiguration by Finite A…

Several planners have been developed to compute dynamically feasible, collision-free robot paths from an initial to a goal configuration. A key assumption in these works is that the goal region is reachable; an assumption that often fails…

Multi-robot assembly systems are becoming increasingly appealing in manufacturing due to their ability to automatically, flexibly, and quickly construct desired structural designs. However, effectively planning for these systems in a manner…

We study centralized reconfiguration problems for geometric amoebot structures. A set of $n$ amoebots occupy nodes on the triangular grid and can reconfigure via expansion and contraction operations. We focus on the joint movement…

Motivated by the prospect of nano-robots that assist human physiological functions at the nanoscale, we investigate the coating problem in the three-dimensional model for hybrid programmable matter. In this model, a single agent with…

Complex manipulation tasks, such as rearrangement planning of numerous objects, are combinatorially hard problems. Existing algorithms either do not scale well or assume a great deal of prior knowledge about the environment, and few offer…

Tile Automata is a recently defined model of self-assembly that borrows many concepts from cellular automata to create active self-assembling systems where changes may be occurring within an assembly without requiring attachment. This model…

Self-assembly is a process which is ubiquitous in natural, especially biological systems. It occurs when groups of relatively simple components spontaneously combine to form more complex structures. While such systems have inspired a large…

Hybrid automata are a natural framework for modeling and analyzing systems which exhibit a mixed discrete continuous behaviour. However, the standard operational semantics defined over such models implicitly assume perfect knowledge of the…

Within a component-based approach allowing dynamic reconfigurations, sequences of successive reconfiguration operations are expressed by means of reconfiguration paths, possibly infinite. We show that a subclass of such paths can be…

We present a hybrid mimetic finite-difference and virtual element formulation for coupled single-phase poromechanics on unstructured meshes. The key advantage of the scheme is that it is convergent on complex meshes containing highly…

Robots often need to be reconfigurable$-$to customize, calibrate, or optimize robots operating in varying environments with different hardware). A particular challenge in robotics is the automated and dynamic reconfiguration to load and…

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…

We propose a model-based, automated, bottom-up approach for design, which is applicable to various physical domains, but in this work we focus on the electrical domain. This bottom-up approach is based on a meta-topology in which each link…

Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…

The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting soft robots' behavior, but its computation time can limit practical applications. In this paper, a learning-based approach based on condensation of the FEM model is…

Localized features such as singularities, sharp gradients, discontinuities, and moving sources require adaptive finite element discretizations. Conventional refinement strategies introduce significant computational overhead through…

Imagine an assembly line where a box with a lid and liquid in it enters in some unknown orientation. The box should leave the line with the open lid facing upwards with the liquid still in it. To save costs there are no complex sensors or…

An accurate, physically-based, and differentiable model of soft robots can unlock downstream applications in optimal control. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an expressive approach for modeling highly deformable structures such as…

Roboticists have been seeking to address this situation in recent years through the use of soft robots. Unfortunately, identifying appropriate models for the complete analysis and investigation of soft robots for design and control purposes…

We develop a framework for applying treewidth-based dynamic programming on graphs with "hybrid structure", i.e., with parts that may not have small treewidth but instead possess other structural properties. Informally, this is achieved by…