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Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Recent advances in 3D printing and manufacturing of miniaturized robotic hardware and computing are paving the way to build inexpensive and disposable robots. This will have a large impact on several applications including scientific…
Robot co-design, jointly optimizing morphology and control policy, remains a longstanding challenge in the robotics community, where many promising robots have been developed. However, a key limitation lies in its tendency to converge to…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, and interaction.…
We present a challenging new benchmark and learning-environment for robot learning: RLBench. The benchmark features 100 completely unique, hand-designed tasks ranging in difficulty, from simple target reaching and door opening, to longer…
For robot manipulation, both the controller and end-effector design are crucial. Soft grippers are generalizable by deforming to different geometries, but designing such a gripper and finding its grasp pose remains challenging. In this…
Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…
We introduce controlgym, a library of thirty-six industrial control settings, and ten infinite-dimensional partial differential equation (PDE)-based control problems. Integrated within the OpenAI Gym/Gymnasium (Gym) framework, controlgym…
Understanding the world and explaining it with scientific theories is a central aspiration of artificial intelligence research. Proposing theories, designing experiments to test them, and then revising them based on data are fundamental to…
Soft robots can exhibit better performance in specific tasks compared to conventional robots, particularly in healthcare-related tasks. However, the field of soft robotics is still young, and designing them often involves mimicking natural…
An accurate, physically-based, and differentiable model of soft robots can unlock downstream applications in optimal control. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an expressive approach for modeling highly deformable structures such as…
The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
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…
Data scaling and standardized evaluation benchmarks have driven significant advances in natural language processing and computer vision. However, robotics faces unique challenges in scaling data and establishing evaluation protocols.…
Benchmarking plays an important role in the development of novel search algorithms as well as for the assessment and comparison of contemporary algorithmic ideas. This paper presents common principles that need to be taken into account when…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…