Related papers: SMORES-EP, a Modular Robot with Parallel Self-asse…
Humans can produce complex whole-body motions when interacting with their surroundings, by planning, executing and combining individual limb movements. We investigated this fundamental aspect of motor control in the setting of autonomous…
The deployment of complex soft robots in multiphysics environments requires advanced simulation frameworks that not only capture interactions between different types of material, but also translate accurately to real-world performance. Soft…
Robot pick and place systems have traditionally decoupled grasp, placement, and motion planning to build sequential optimization pipelines with the assumption that the individual components will be able to work together. However, this…
Unlike conventional mechanisms, compliant mechanisms produce the desired deformations by exploiting elastic strain and do not need, therefore, moving parts. The number of degrees of freedom of a conventional mechanism, also called mobility,…
We present a simulation framework for lunar construction work involving multiple autonomous machines. The framework supports modelling of construction scenarios and autonomy solutions, execution of the scenarios in simulation, and analysis…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
A large-scale mobile robot (LSMR) is a high-order multibody system that often operates on loose, unconsolidated terrain, which reduces traction. This paper presents a comprehensive navigation and control framework for an LSMR that ensures…
We present a control framework that enables humanoid robots to perform collaborative transportation tasks with a human partner. The framework supports both translational and rotational motions, which are fundamental to co-transport…
Stack-of-Tasks (SoT) control allows a robot to simultaneously fulfill a number of prioritized goals formulated in terms of (in)equality constraints in error space. Since this approach solves a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QP) at each…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
Morphological computing, the use of the physical design of a robot to ease the realization of a given task has been proven to be a relevant concept in the context of swarm robotics. Here we demonstrate both experimentally and numerically,…
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…
This paper introduces collaborating robots which provide the possibility of enhanced task performance, high reliability and decreased. Collaborating-bots are a collection of mobile robots able to self-assemble and to self-organize in order…
Biped robots are inherently unstable because of their complex kinematics as well as dynamics. Despite the many research efforts in developing biped locomotion, the performance of biped locomotion is still far from the expectations. This…
This paper proposes a modular framework to generate robust biped locomotion using a tight coupling between an analytical walking approach and deep reinforcement learning. This framework is composed of six main modules which are…
In modular robotics, modules can be reconfigured to change the morphology of the robot, making it able to adapt for specific tasks. However, optimizing both the body and control is a difficult challenge due to the intricate relationship…
Expert parallelism is vital for effectively training Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, enabling different devices to host distinct experts, with each device processing different input data. However, during expert parallel training, dynamic…
The deployment of mobile robots for material handling in industrial environments requires scalable coordination of large fleets in dynamic settings. This paper presents a two-layer framework that combines high-level scheduling with…
Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…
A generic architecture for a class of distributed robotic systems is presented. The architecture supports openness and heterogeneity, i.e. heterogeneous components may be joined and removed from the systems without affecting its basic…