Related papers: Sim2real gap is non-monotonic with robot complexit…
Hyper-redundant robots offer high dexterity, making them good at operating in confined and unstructured environments. To extend the reachable workspace, we built a multi-segment flexible rack actuated planar robot. However, the compliance…
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…
Shape-morphing soft materials can enable diverse target morphologies through voxel-level material distribution design, offering significant potential for various applications. Despite progress in basic shape-morphing design with simple…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Robotic ultrasound (US) systems have shown great potential to make US examinations easier and more accurate. Recently, various machine learning techniques have been proposed to realize automatic US image interpretation for robotic US…
Does progress in simulation translate to progress on robots? If one method outperforms another in simulation, how likely is that trend to hold in reality on a robot? We examine this question for embodied PointGoal navigation, developing…
Sim-to-real is a mainstream method to cope with the large number of trials needed by typical deep reinforcement learning methods. However, transferring a policy trained in simulation to actual hardware remains an open challenge due to the…
In this paper, we present a generalized, comprehensive nonlinear mathematical model and conceptual design for the MetaMorpher, a metamorphic Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) designed to bridge the gap between vertical takeoff and landing…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
Designing a robot or structure that can fold itself into a target shape is a process that involves challenges originated from multiple sources. For example, the designer of rigid self-folding robots must consider foldability from geometric…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
The development of artificial intelligence towards real-time interaction with the environment is a key aspect of embodied intelligence and robotics. Inverse dynamics is a fundamental robotics problem, which maps from joint space to torque…
We propose to use morphing algorithms to deduce some approximate wave pictures of scattering by cylindrical invisibility cloaks of various shapes deduced from the exact computation (e.g. using a finite element method) of scattering by…
Inspired by flight characteristics captured from live Monarch butterflies, an optimal control problem is presented while accounting the effects of low-frequency flapping and abdomen undulation. A flapping-wing aerial vehicle is modeled as…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) based techniques combined with training in simulation have offered a new approach to developing robust controllers for legged robots. However, the application of such approaches to real…
Morphological development is part of the way any human or animal learns. The learning processes starts with the morphology at birth and progresses through changing morphologies until adulthood is reached. Biologically, this seems to…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…