Related papers: Behavioral Repertoires for Soft Tensegrity Robots
Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid rods and flexible cables, exhibit high strength-to-weight ratios and significant deformations, which enable them to navigate unstructured terrains and survive harsh impacts. They are hard to control,…
Deep reinforcement learning has great potential to acquire complex, adaptive behaviors for autonomous agents automatically. However, the underlying neural network polices have not been widely deployed in real-world applications, especially…
Perception algorithms that provide estimates of their uncertainty are crucial to the development of autonomous robots that can operate in challenging and uncontrolled environments. Such perception algorithms provide the means for having…
The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Soft actuators offer compliant and safe interaction with an unstructured environment compared to their rigid counterparts. However, control of these systems is often challenging because they are inherently under-actuated, have infinite…
Dynamic task allocation is an essential requirement for multi-robot systems operating in unknown dynamic environments. It allows robots to change their behavior in response to environmental changes or actions of other robots in order to…
In this paper, we present an approach for learning collision-free robot trajectories in the presence of moving obstacles. As a first step, we train a backup policy to generate evasive movements from arbitrary initial robot states using…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
Today, the most widespread, widely applicable technology for gathering data relies on experienced scientists armed with handheld radio telemetry equipment to locate low-power radio transmitters attached to wildlife from the ground. Although…
Soft robots are powerful tools for manipulating delicate objects, yet their adoption is hindered by two gaps: the lack of integrated tactile sensing and sensor signal distortion caused by actuator deformations. This paper addresses these…
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…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
Tensegrity robots are composed of rigid struts and flexible cables. They constitute an emerging class of hybrid rigid-soft robotic systems and are promising systems for a wide array of applications, ranging from locomotion to assembly. They…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
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…
This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…
Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…
Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…