Related papers: Diversity-based Design Assist for Large Legged Rob…
The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main…
Deformable robots are notoriously difficult to model or control due to its high-dimensional configuration spaces. Direct trajectory optimization suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality and incurs a high computational cost, while…
The design (shape) of a robot is usually decided before the control is implemented. This might limit how well the design is adapted to a task, as the suitability of the design is given by how well the robot performs in the task, which…
This paper presents a novel approach to enhance Model Predictive Control (MPC) for legged robots through Distributed Optimization. Our method focuses on decomposing the robot dynamics into smaller, parallelizable subsystems, and utilizing…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, and MAP-Elites (ME) in particular, have proven very useful for a broad range of applications including enabling real robots to recover quickly from joint damage, solving strongly deceptive maze tasks or…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…
We study the effects of injecting human-generated designs into the initial population of an evolutionary robotics experiment, where subsequent population of robots are optimised via a Genetic Algorithm and MAP-Elites. First, human…
Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…
Vision-based robotics often separates the control loop into one module for perception and a separate module for control. It is possible to train the whole system end-to-end (e.g. with deep RL), but doing it "from scratch" comes with a high…
This work tries to contribute to the design of legged robots with capabilities boosted through thruster-assisted locomotion. Our long-term goal is the development of robots capable of negotiating unstructured environments, including land…
Shared control in assistive robotics blends human autonomy with computer assistance, thus simplifying complex tasks for individuals with physical impairments. This study assesses an adaptive Degrees of Freedom control method specifically…
Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…
Many new methodologies for the control of large-scale multi-agent systems are based on macroscopic representations of the emerging system dynamics, in the form of continuum approximations of large ensembles. These techniques, that are…
Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…
In multi-robot systems, achieving coordinated missions remains a significant challenge due to the coupled nature of coordination behaviors and the lack of global information for individual robots. To mitigate these challenges, this paper…
Robot swarms offer inherent robustness and the capacity to execute complex, collaborative tasks surpassing the capabilities of single-agent systems. Co-designing these systems is critical, as marginal improvements in individual performance…
The goal of this study is to identify factors that support and enhance older adults' creative experiences in human-robot co-creativity. Because the research into the use of robots for creativity support with older adults remains…
Facing the physical limitations and energy consumption bottlenecks of traditional electronic devices, we propose an innovative design framework integrating evolutionary algorithms and metasurface technology, aiming to achieve intelligent…
In Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, which evolve a behaviourally diverse archive of high-performing solutions, the behaviour space is a difficult design choice that should be tailored to the target application. In QD meta-evolution, one…
In biomechanics and robotics, elasticity plays a crucial role in enhancing locomotion efficiency and stability. Traditional approaches in legged robots often employ series elastic actuators (SEA) with discrete rigid components, which, while…