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The significant role of epigenetic mechanisms within natural systems has become increasingly clear. This paper uses a recently presented abstract, tunable Boolean genetic regulatory network model to explore aspects of epigenetics. It is…

Understanding environment dynamics is necessary for robots to act safely and optimally in the world. In realistic scenarios, dynamics are non-stationary and the causal variables such as environment parameters cannot necessarily be precisely…

We describe a challenging robotics deployment in a complex ecosystem to monitor a rich plant community. The study site is dominated by dynamic grassland vegetation and is thus visually ambiguous and liable to drastic appearance change over…

A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…

Animals are equipped with a rich innate repertoire of sensory, behavioral and motor skills, which allows them to interact with the world immediately after birth. At the same time, many behaviors are highly adaptive and can be tailored to…

This paper studies how global dynamics and knowledge of high-level features can inform decision-making for robots in flow-like environments. Specifically, we investigate how coherent sets, an environmental feature found in these…

Prospection is an important part of how humans come up with new task plans, but has not been explored in depth in robotics. Predicting multiple task-level is a challenging problem that involves capturing both task semantics and continuous…

Cultural adaptation, i.e., the matching of a robot's behaviours to the cultural norms and preferences of its user, is a well known key requirement for the success of any assistive application. However, culture-dependent robot behaviours are…

Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…

We present a model of the evolution of control systems in a genome under environmental constraints. The model conceptually follows the Jacob and Monod model of gene control. Genes contain control elements which respond to the internal state…

The characterization of plasticity, robustness, and evolvability, an important issue in biology, is studied in terms of phenotypic fluctuations. By numerically evolving gene regulatory networks, the proportionality between the phenotypic…

The evolution of high-dimensional phenotypes is investigated using a statistical physics model consists of interacting spins, in which genotypes, phenotypes, and environments are represented by spin configurations, interaction matrices, and…

In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying plan transformations to general manipulation plans in order to specialize them to the specific situation at hand. We present a framework for optimizing execution and achieving higher…

Swarm robotics is a promising approach for the coordination of large numbers of robots. While previous studies have shown that evolutionary robotics techniques can be applied to obtain robust and efficient self-organized behaviors for robot…

In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…

Learning algorithms are enabling robots to solve increasingly challenging real-world tasks. These approaches often rely on demonstrations and reproduce the behavior shown. Unexpected changes in the environment may require using different…

In this paper we present a reformulation--framed as a constrained optimization problem--of multi-robot tasks which are encoded through a cost function that is to be minimized. The advantages of this approach are multiple. The…

Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…

Rapid anthropogenic environmental changes, including those due to habitat contamination, degradation, and climate change, have far-reaching effects on biological systems that may outpace animals' adaptive responses (Radchuk et al., 2019).…

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…