Related papers: Diversity-based Design Assist for Large Legged Rob…
Robots hold significant promise to assist with providing care to an aging population and to help overcome increasing caregiver demands. Although a large body of research has explored robotic assistance for individuals with disabilities and…
The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
Thanks to recent advancements in accelerating non-linear model predictive control (NMPC), it is now feasible to deploy whole-body NMPC at real-time rates for humanoid robots. However, enforcing inequality constraints in real time for such…
Brain-body co-evolution enables animals to develop complex behaviors in their environments. Inspired by this biological synergy, embodied co-design (ECD) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for creating intelligent agents-from virtual…
Co-designing autonomous robotic agents involves simultaneously optimizing the controller and physical design of the agent. Its inherent bi-level optimization formulation necessitates an outer loop design optimization driven by an inner loop…
Autonomous robots have the potential to serve as versatile caregivers that improve quality of life for millions of people worldwide. Yet, conducting research in this area presents numerous challenges, including the risks of physical…
Collaborative robots must simultaneously be safe enough to operate in close proximity to human operators and powerful enough to assist users in industrial tasks such as lifting heavy equipment. The requirement for safety necessitates that…
Modular robots can be reconfigured to create a variety of designs from a small set of components. But constructing a robot's hardware on its own is not enough -- each robot needs a controller. One could create controllers for some designs…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
The human ability to learn, generalize, and control complex manipulation tasks through multi-modality feedback suggests a unique capability, which we refer to as dexterity intelligence. Understanding and assessing this intelligence is a…
This paper proposes a cooperative environmental learning algorithm working in a fully distributed manner. A multi-robot system is more effective for exploration tasks than a single robot, but it involves the following challenges: 1) online…
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed the field of artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in natural language processing and moving towards multi-modal functionality.…
This paper addresses two intertwined needs for collaborative robots operating in shop-floor environments. The first is the ability to perform complex manipulation operations, such as those on articulated or even flexible objects, in a way…
In the domain of assistive robotics, the significance of effective modeling is well acknowledged. Prior research has primarily focused on enhancing model accuracy or involved the collection of extensive, often impractical amounts of data.…
This work introduces a model-free reinforcement learning framework that enables various modes of motion (quadruped, tripod, or biped) and diverse tasks for legged robot locomotion. We employ a motion-style reward based on a relaxed…
An attached arm can significantly increase the applicability of legged robots to several mobile manipulation tasks that are not possible for the wheeled or tracked counterparts. The standard hierarchical control pipeline for such legged…
Cooperative Co-evolution, through the decomposition of the problem space, is a primary approach for solving large-scale global optimization problems. Typically, when the subspaces are disjoint, the algorithms demonstrate significantly both…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Centipedes exhibit great maneuverability in diverse environments due to their many legs and body-driven control. By leveraging similar morphologies and control strategies, their robotic counterparts also demonstrate effective terrestrial…