Related papers: Full-Body Visual Self-Modeling of Robot Morphologi…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
The ongoing deep learning revolution has allowed computers to outclass humans in various games and perceive features imperceptible to humans during classification tasks. Current machine learning techniques have clearly distinguished…
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,…
Similar to humans, robots benefit from interacting with their environment through a number of different sensor modalities, such as vision, touch, sound. However, learning from different sensor modalities is difficult, because the learning…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
Neurocognitive models of higher-level somatosensory processing have emphasised the role of stored body representations in interpreting real-time sensory signals coming from the body (Longo, Azanon and Haggard, 2010; Tame, Azanon and Longo,…
In order to engage in complex social interaction, humans learn at a young age to infer what others see and cannot see from a different point-of-view, and learn to predict others' plans and behaviors. These abilities have been mostly lacking…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to…
We present an approach to learn an object-centric forward model, and show that this allows us to plan for sequences of actions to achieve distant desired goals. We propose to model a scene as a collection of objects, each with an explicit…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
Robot-assisted dressing could profoundly enhance the quality of life of adults with physical disabilities. To achieve this, a robot can benefit from both visual and force sensing. The former enables the robot to ascertain human body pose…
For many real-world robotics applications, robots need to continually adapt and learn new concepts. Further, robots need to learn through limited data because of scarcity of labeled data in the real-world environments. To this end, my…
Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…
The ability to accurately predict the surrounding environment is a foundational principle of intelligence in biological and artificial agents. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been proposed for learning to predict the physical…
Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle…
Many model-based Visual Odometry (VO) algorithms have been proposed in the past decade, often restricted to the type of camera optics, or the underlying motion manifold observed. We envision robots to be able to learn and perform these…
Unsupervised learning of a generalizable model of the visual appearance of humans from video data is of major importance for computing systems interacting naturally with their users and others. We propose a step towards automatic behavior…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
An open problem in robotics is that of using vision to identify a robot's own body and the world around it. Many models attempt to recover the traditional C-space parameters. Instead, we propose an alternative C-space by deriving…