Related papers: Friction modulation in limbless, three-dimensional…
Contact-rich problems, such as snake robot locomotion, offer unexplored yet rich opportunities for optimization-based trajectory and acyclic contact planning. So far, a substantial body of control research has focused on emulating snake…
This paper proposes a method to learn from human demonstration compliant contact motions, which take advantage of interaction forces between workpieces to align them, even when contact force may occur from different directions on different…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
How microorganisms respond to and interact with their environment can vary significantly from individual to individual, which can have important microbiological and ecological implications. However, most microscopy techniques can only…
We study the relation between short-time vibrational modes and long-time relaxational dynamics in a kinetically constrained lattice gas with harmonic interactions between neighbouring particles. We find a correlation between the location of…
The paper addresses the problem of a Mode III interfacial crack advancing quasi-statically in a heterogeneous composite material, that is a two-phase material containing elastic inclusions, both soft and stiff, and defects, such as…
Friction modulation technology enables the creation of textural effects on flat haptic displays. However, an intuitive and manageably small design space for construction of such haptic textures remains an unfulfilled goal for user interface…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
Dynamics modeling in outdoor and unstructured environments is difficult because different elements in the environment interact with the robot in ways that can be hard to predict. Leveraging multiple sensors to perceive maximal information…
We propose FreeMusco, a motion-free framework that jointly learns latent representations and control policies for musculoskeletal characters. By leveraging the musculoskeletal model as a strong prior, our method enables energy-aware and…
Human locomotion emerges from high-dimensional neuromuscular control, making predictive musculoskeletal simulation challenging. We present a physiology-informed reinforcement-learning framework that constrains control using muscle…
Primates constantly explore their surroundings via saccadic eye movements that bring different parts of an image into high resolution. In addition to exploring new regions in the visual field, primates also make frequent return fixations,…
We consider a model for the evolution of an interface in a heterogeneous environment governed by a parabolic equation. The heterogeneity is introduced as obstacles exerting a localized dry friction. Our main result establishes the emergence…
Strapdown inertial navigation research involves the parameterization and computation of the attitude, velocity and position of a rigid body in a chosen reference frame. The community has long devoted to finding the most concise and…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
Synthesizing interaction-involved human motions has been challenging due to the high complexity of 3D environments and the diversity of possible human behaviors within. We present LAMA, Locomotion-Action-MAnipulation, to synthesize natural…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we…
Friction is the essential mediator of terrestrial locomotion, yet in robotic systems it is almost always treated as a passive property fixed by surface materials and conditions. Here, we introduce ultrasonic lubrication as a method to…
We present a method that infers spatial arrangements and shapes of humans and objects in a globally consistent 3D scene, all from a single image in-the-wild captured in an uncontrolled environment. Notably, our method runs on datasets…