Related papers: Full-Body Visual Self-Modeling of Robot Morphologi…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…
A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
This paper presents a study on the development of an obstacle-avoidance navigation system for autonomous navigation in home environments. The system utilizes vision-based techniques and advanced path-planning algorithms to enable the robot…
To solve tasks in complex environments, robots need to learn from experience. Deep reinforcement learning is a common approach to robot learning but requires a large amount of trial and error to learn, limiting its deployment in the…
We design a new approach that allows robot learning of new activities from unlabeled human example videos. Given videos of humans executing the same activity from a human's viewpoint (i.e., first-person videos), our objective is to make the…
Robots are traditionally bounded by a fixed embodiment during their operational lifetime, which limits their ability to adapt to their surroundings. Co-optimizing control and morphology of a robot, however, is often inefficient due to the…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…
3D-aware visual pretraining has proven effective in improving the performance of downstream robotic manipulation tasks. However, existing methods are constrained to Euclidean embedding spaces, whose flat geometry limits their ability to…
Background The development of a simulation model of full body reaching tasks that can predict endeffector trajectories and joint excursions consistent with experimental data is a non-trivial task. Because of the kinematic redundancy…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
Developing robot controllers in a simulated environment is advantageous but transferring the controllers to the target environment presents challenges, often referred to as the "sim-to-real gap". We present a method for continuous…
Visual servoing enables robotic systems to perform accurate closed-loop control, which is required in many applications. However, existing methods either require precise calibration of the robot kinematic model and cameras or use neural…
Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…
Can we enable humanoid robots to generate rich, diverse, and expressive motions in the real world? We propose to learn a whole-body control policy on a human-sized robot to mimic human motions as realistic as possible. To train such a…
Prospection, the act of predicting the consequences of many possible futures, is intrinsic to human planning and action, and may even be at the root of consciousness. Surprisingly, this idea has been explored comparatively little in…
Purpose of Review: To effectively synthesise and analyse multi-robot behaviour, we require formal task-level models which accurately capture multi-robot execution. In this paper, we review modelling formalisms for multi-robot systems under…
This paper presents a method for identifying mechanical parameters of robots or objects, such as their mass and friction coefficients. Key features are the use of off-the-shelf physics engines and the adaptation of a Bayesian optimization…
Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified…