Related papers: Tuning upstream swimming of micro-robots by shape …
Powered by acoustics, existing therapeutic and diagnostic procedures will become less invasive and new methods will become available that have never been available before. Acoustically driven microrobot navigation based on microbubbles is a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a flexible and efficient method for programming micro-robots in complex environments. Here we investigate whether reinforcement learning can provide insights into biological systems when trained to perform…
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…
Many biological microswimmers can modulate their swimming gait to achieve directional control of motility, especially when performing steering towards specific directional cues. This can be achieved without the need for obvious…
Hydrodynamic interactions play a key role in the swimming behavior and power consumption of bio-inspired and bio-mimetic micro-swimmers, Cybernetic or artificial alike. As micro-robotic devices, bio-inspired micro-swimmers require fast and…
Retargeting human kinematic reference motion onto a robot's morphology remains a formidable challenge. Existing methods often produce physical inconsistencies, such as foot sliding, self-collisions, or dynamically infeasible motions, which…
Swimming, i.e., being able to advance in the absence of external forces by performing cyclic shape changes, is particularly demanding at low Reynolds numbers which is the regime of interest for micro-organisms and micro-robots. We focus on…
This paper presents a trajectory optimization and control approach for the guidance of an orbital four-arm robot in extravehicular activities. The robot operates near the target spacecraft, enabling its arm's end-effectors to reach the…
Automatic optimization of robotic behavior has been the long-standing goal of Evolutionary Robotics. Allowing the problem at hand to be solved by automation often leads to novel approaches and new insights. A common problem encountered with…
We study the properties of arbitrary micro-swimmers towing a passive load through a viscous liquid. The simple close-form expression for the dragging efficiency of a general micro-swimmer dragging a distant load is found, and the leading…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
We present a new framework for prioritized multi-task motion-force control of fully-actuated robots. This work is established on a careful review and comparison of the state of the art. Some control frameworks are not optimal, that is they…
Most traffic flow control algorithms address switching cycle adaptation of traffic signals and lights. This work addresses traffic flow optimisation by self-organising micro-level control combining Reinforcement Learning and rule-based…
Autonomous ocean-exploring vehicles have begun to take advantage of onboard sensor measurements of water properties such as salinity and temperature to locate oceanic features in real time. Such targeted sampling strategies enable more…
Circumnavigation control is useful in real-world applications such as entrapping a hostile target. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous multi-robot system where robots have different physical properties, such as maximum movement…
Planning and acting in 3D environments is a fundamental capability for robotic manipulation in the real world. Although prior work has explored predictive flow planners to guide 3D manipulation, existing approaches often rely on modular…
This paper presents a method for constrained motion planning from vision, which enables a robot to move its end-effector over an observed surface, given start and destination points. The robot has no prior knowledge of the surface shape,…
Motion retargeting holds a premise of offering a larger set of motion data for characters and robots with different morphologies. Many prior works have approached this problem via either handcrafted constraints or paired motion datasets,…
A major puzzle in biology is how mammalian sperm determine and maintain the correct swimming direction during the various phases of the sexual reproduction process. Whilst chemotaxis is assumed to dominate in the immediate vicinity of the…
Metachronal paddling is a swimming strategy in which an organism oscillates sets of adjacent limbs with a constant phase lag, propagating a metachronal wave through its limbs and propelling it forward. This limb coordination strategy is…