Related papers: Online adaptation in robots as biological developm…
Technological developments call for increasing perception and action capabilities of robots. Among other skills, vision systems that can adapt to any possible change in the working conditions are needed. Since these conditions are…
A self-adaptive system can modify its own structure and behavior at runtime based on its perception of the environment, of itself and of its requirements. To develop a self-adaptive system, software developers codify knowledge about the…
Developing reliable mechanisms for continuous local learning is a central challenge faced by biological and artificial systems. Yet, how the environmental factors and structural constraints on the learning network influence the optimal…
In the field of evolutionary robotics, choosing the correct encoding is very complicated, especially when robots evolve both behaviours and morphologies at the same time. With the objective of improving our understanding of the mapping…
Mobile robots should be capable of planning cost-efficient paths for autonomous navigation. Typically, the terrain and robot properties are subject to variations. For instance, properties of the terrain such as friction may vary across…
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 physical coupling between robots has the potential to improve the capabilities of multi-robot systems in challenging manufacturing processes. However, the path tracking accuracy of physically coupled robots is not studied adequately,…
The ability to accomplish manipulation and locomotion tasks in the presence of significant time-varying external loads is a remarkable skill of humans that has yet to be replicated convincingly by humanoid robots. Such an ability will be a…
This short paper presents an abstract, tunable model of genomic structural change within the cell lifecycle and explores its use with simulated evolution. A well-known Boolean model of genetic regulatory networks is extended to include…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Artificial neural networks can be used to solve a variety of robotic tasks. However, they risk failing catastrophically when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) situations. Several approaches have employed a type of synaptic plasticity…
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…
Autonomous robots must go from zero prior knowledge to safe control within seconds to operate in unstructured environments. Abrupt terrain changes, such as a sudden transition to ice, create dynamics shifts that can destabilize planners…
Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…
As robots venture into the real world, they are subject to unmodeled dynamics and disturbances. Traditional model-based control approaches have been proven successful in relatively static and known operating environments. However, when an…
Collision avoidance in unknown obstacle-cluttered environments may not always be feasible. This paper focuses on an emerging paradigm shift in which potential collisions with the environment can be harnessed instead of being avoided…
Biological neural networks are characterized by their high degree of plasticity, a core property that enables the remarkable adaptability of natural organisms. Importantly, this ability affects both the synaptic strength and the topology of…
Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…
Deploying robots in human environments requires effective social robot navigation. This article focuses on proxemics, proposing a new taxonomy and suggesting future directions through an analysis of state-of-the-art studies and the…
Different Boolean networks may reveal similar dynamics although their definition differs, then preventing their distinction from the observations. This raises the question about the sufficiency of a particular Boolean network for properly…