Related papers: Evolution Gym: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Evolvin…
Autonomous robot swarms must be able to make fast and accurate collective decisions, but speed and accuracy are known to be conflicting goals. While collective decision-making is widely studied in swarm robotics research, only few works on…
The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
This paper addresses the challenge of co-designing morphology and control in soft robots via a novel neural network evolution approach. We propose an innovative method to implicitly dual-encode soft robots, thus facilitating the…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Humanoid robots have seen significant advancements in both design and control, with a growing emphasis on integrating these aspects to enhance overall performance. Traditionally, robot design has followed a sequential process, where control…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…
Robots moving safely and in a socially compliant manner in dynamic human environments is an essential benchmark for long-term robot autonomy. However, it is not feasible to learn and benchmark social navigation behaviors entirely in the…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…
Brain-body co-optimization remains a challenging problem, despite increasing interest from the community in recent years. To understand and overcome the challenges, we propose exhaustively mapping a morphology-fitness landscape to study it.…
Advanced machine learning algorithms require platforms that are extremely robust and equipped with rich sensory feedback to handle extensive trial-and-error learning without relying on strong inductive biases. Traditional robotic designs,…
In recent years, both reinforcement learning and learning-based control -- as well as the study of their safety, which is crucial for deployment in real-world robots -- have gained significant traction. However, to adequately gauge the…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Evolutionary Robotics and Robot Learning are two fields in robotics that aim to automatically optimize robot designs. The key difference between them lies in what is being optimized and the time scale involved. Evolutionary Robotics is a…
The ability to autonomously explore and resolve tasks with minimal human guidance is crucial for the self-development of embodied intelligence. Although reinforcement learning methods can largely ease human effort, it's challenging to…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of links,…