Related papers: Online adaptation in robots as biological developm…
Understanding control mechanisms in biological systems plays a crucial role in important applications, for instance in cell reprogramming. Boolean modeling allows the identification of possible efficient strategies, helping to reduce the…
In the past decades, considerable attention has been paid to bio-inspired intelligence and its applications to robotics. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of bio-inspired intelligence, with a focus on neurodynamics approaches, to…
Safe deployment of autonomous robots in diverse scenarios requires agents that are capable of efficiently adapting to new environments while satisfying constraints. In this work, we propose a practical and theoretically-justified approach…
We present and discuss the results of an experimental analysis in the design of Boolean networks by means of genetic algorithms. A population of networks is evolved with the aim of finding a network such that the attractor it reaches is of…
Slip is a very common phenomena present in wheeled mobile robotic systems. It has undesirable consequences such as wasting energy and impeding system stability. To tackle the challenge of mobile robot trajectory tracking under slippery…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…
Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…
Social networks continuously change as new ties are created and existing ones fade. It is widely noted that our social embedding exerts a strong influence on what information we receive and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However,…
We introduce a novel, biologically plausible local learning rule that provably increases the robustness of neural dynamics to noise in nonlinear recurrent neural networks with homogeneous nonlinearities. Our learning rule achieves higher…
Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental…
Navigation functions provide both path and motion planning, which can be used to ensure obstacle avoidance and convergence in the sphere world. When dealing with complex and realistic scenarios, constructing a transformation to the sphere…
We present a real-time algorithm, SocioSense, for socially-aware navigation of a robot amongst pedestrians. Our approach computes time-varying behaviors of each pedestrian using Bayesian learning and Personality Trait theory. These…
We consider the problem of navigating a mobile robot towards a target in an unknown environment that is endowed with visual sensors, where neither the robot nor the sensors have access to global positioning information and only use…
For years, we have been building models of gene regulatory networks, where recent advances in molecular biology shed some light on new structural and dynamical properties of such highly complex systems. In this work, we propose a novel…
Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
The adaptive learning capabilities seen in biological neural networks are largely a product of the self-modifying behavior emerging from online plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Current methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL) only…
The exponentially increasing advances in robotics and machine learning are facilitating the transition of robots from being confined to controlled industrial spaces to performing novel everyday tasks in domestic and urban environments. In…
In real-world robotics applications, accurate models of robot dynamics are critical for safe and stable control in rapidly changing operational conditions. This motivates the use of machine learning techniques to approximate robot dynamics…