Related papers: Full-Body Visual Self-Modeling of Robot Morphologi…
Humans navigate in their environment by learning a mental model of the world through passive observation and active interaction. Their world model allows them to anticipate what might happen next and act accordingly with respect to an…
While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
Physical interactive robotics, ranging from wearable devices to collaborative humanoid robots, require close coordination between mechanical design and control. However, evaluating interactive dynamics is challenging due to complex human…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
We propose a learning-based system for enabling quadrupedal robots to manipulate large, heavy objects using their whole body. Our system is based on a hierarchical control strategy that uses the deep latent variable embedding which captures…
Learning versatile whole-body skills by tracking various human motions is a fundamental step toward general-purpose humanoid robots. This task is particularly challenging because a single policy must master a broad repertoire of motion…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to operate in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments, performing tasks such as manipulation, navigation, and decision-making. Achieving these capabilities requires agents to understand the…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
Mobile robots with complex morphology are essential for traversing rough terrains in Urban Search & Rescue missions (USAR). Since teleoperation of the complex morphology causes high cognitive load of the operator, the morphology is…
Robot introspection, as opposed to anomaly detection typical in process monitoring, helps a robot understand what it is doing at all times. A robot should be able to identify its actions not only when failure or novelty occurs, but also as…
Self-driving vehicles are a maturing technology with the potential to reshape mobility by enhancing the safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience of automotive transportation. Safety-critical tasks that must be executed by a…
Visual representation learning hold great promise for robotics, but is severely hampered by the scarcity and homogeneity of robotics datasets. Recent works address this problem by pre-training visual representations on large-scale but…
For a robot, its body structure is an a-prior knowledge when it is designed. However, when such information is not available, can a robot recognize it by itself? In this paper, we aim to grant a robot such ability to learn its body…
In the robot follow-ahead task, a mobile robot is tasked to maintain its relative position in front of a moving human actor while keeping the actor in sight. To accomplish this task, it is important that the robot understand the full 3D…
Most computational accounts of cognitive maps assume that stability is achieved primarily through sensory anchoring, with self-motion contributing to incremental positional updates only. However, biological spatial representations often…