Related papers: Data-efficient Co-Adaptation of Morphology and Beh…
Reinforcement learning holds the promise of enabling autonomous robots to learn large repertoires of behavioral skills with minimal human intervention. However, robotic applications of reinforcement learning often compromise the autonomy of…
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…
The main novelty of the proposed approach is that it allows a robot to learn an end-to-end policy which can adapt to changes in the environment during execution. While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature,…
Swimming microrobots are increasingly developed with complex materials and dynamic shapes and are expected to operate in complex environments in which the system dynamics are difficult to model and positional control of the microrobot is…
Interesting and efficient collective behavior observed in multi-robot or swarm systems emerges from the individual behavior of the robots. The functional space of individual robot behaviors is in turn shaped or constrained by the robot's…
This paper addresses the challenge of co-designing morphology and control in soft robots via a novel neural network evolution approach. We propose an innovative method to implicitly dual-encode soft robots, thus facilitating the…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
The intuitive collaboration of humans and intelligent robots (embodied AI) in the real-world is an essential objective for many desirable applications of robotics. Whilst there is much research regarding explicit communication, we focus on…
Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders continue to be a major challenge in industrial environments, leading to reduced workforce participation, increased healthcare costs, and long-term disability. This study introduces a human-sensitive…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…
Compliance plays a crucial role in manipulation, as it balances between the concurrent control of position and force under uncertainties. Yet compliance is often overlooked by today's visuomotor policies that solely focus on position…
The cooperation among AI systems, and between AI systems and humans is becoming increasingly important. In various real-world tasks, an agent needs to cooperate with unknown partner agent types. This requires the agent to assess the…
Reinforcement learning of real-world tasks is very data inefficient, and extensive simulation-based modelling has become the dominant approach for training systems. However, in human-robot interaction and many other real-world settings,…
Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…
Efficient and robust policy transfer remains a key challenge for reinforcement learning to become viable for real-wold robotics. Policy transfer through warm initialization, imitation, or interacting over a large set of agents with…
Humanoid robots represent a central frontier in embodied intelligence, as their anthropomorphic form enables natural deployment in humans' workspace. Brain-body co-design for humanoids presents a promising approach to realizing this…
Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…
Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…
Although reinforcement learning methods can achieve impressive results in simulation, the real world presents two major challenges: generating samples is exceedingly expensive, and unexpected perturbations or unseen situations cause…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…