Related papers: Sim2real gap is non-monotonic with robot complexit…
Adaptive robotics plays an essential role in achieving truly co-creative cyber physical systems. In robotic manipulation tasks, one of the biggest challenges is to estimate the pose of given workpieces. Even though the recent…
Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often…
The extraordinary aerial agility of hummingbirds and insects continues to inspire the design of flapping-wing drones. To replicate and analyze such flight, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that couple flow solvers with rigid…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
This paper addresses a new strategy called Simulation-to-Real-to-Simulation (Sim2Real2Sim) to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world, and automate a flexible object manipulation task. This strategy consists of three steps: (1)…
Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in soft robotics due to the unpredictability introduced by common manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and molding. These processes often result in deviations from simulated…
Object classification with 3D data is an essential component of any scene understanding method. It has gained significant interest in a variety of communities, most notably in robotics and computer graphics. While the advent of deep…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Evolution and learning have historically been interrelated topics, and their interplay is attracting increased interest lately. The emerging new factor in this trend is morphological evolution, the evolution of physical forms within…
With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult even to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature…
Morphing aerial vehicles offer enhanced maneuverability and fuel efficiency compared to fixed-wing configurations. However, the trade-off between performance gains and control cost in dynamic, unsteady maneuvers remains under-explored. This…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
For the shape control of deformable free-form surfaces, simulation plays a crucial role in establishing the mapping between the actuation parameters and the deformed shapes. The differentiation of this forward kinematic mapping is usually…
Estimating robot pose from a monocular RGB image is a challenge in robotics and computer vision. Existing methods typically build networks on top of 2D visual backbones and depend heavily on labeled data for training, which is often scarce…
The large demand for simulated data has made the reality gap a problem on the forefront of robotics. We propose a method to traverse the gap by tuning available simulation parameters. Through the optimisation of physics engine parameters,…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
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…
Stretching and retracting wingspan has been widely observed in the flight of birds and bats, and its effects on the aerodynamic performance particularly lift generation are intriguing. The rectangular flat-plate flapping wing with a…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…