Related papers: Evolving Modular Soft Robots without Explicit Inte…
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…
Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labour shortages in factories, assist elderly at homes, and colonize new planets. While classical controllers for humanoid robots have…
The increasing number of robots in home environments leads to an emerging coexistence between humans and robots. Robots undertake common tasks and support the residents in their everyday life. People appreciate the presence of robots in…
This paper presents a novel modular robot system that can self-reconfigure to achieve omnidirectional movements for collaborative object transportation. Each robotic module is equipped with a steerable omni-wheel for navigation and is…
In this work we consider the problem of mobile robots that need to manipulate/transport an object via cables or robotic arms. We consider the scenario where the number of manipulating robots is redundant, i.e. a desired object configuration…
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
Compliance is a strong requirement for human-robot interactions. Soft-robots provide an opportunity to cover the lack of compliance in conventional actuation mechanisms, however, the control of them is very challenging given their intrinsic…
This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…
Configurable robots are made up of robotic modules that can be assembled or can configure themselves into multiple robot configurations. In this research plan, a method for upper-body rehabilitation will be discussed in the form of a…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
Developing socially competent robots requires tight integration of robotics, computer vision, speech processing, and web technologies. We present the Socially-interactive Robot Software platform (SROS), an open-source framework addressing…
The control of robots for manipulation tasks generally relies on visual input. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) enable the use of natural language instructions to condition visual input and control robots in a wider range of…
Recently, researchers have explored control methods that embrace nonlinear dynamic coupling instead of suppressing it. Such designs leverage dynamical coupling for communication between different parts of the robot. Morphological…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Natural language is the most intuitive medium for us to interact with other people when expressing commands and instructions. However, using language is seldom an easy task when humans need to express their intent towards robots, since most…
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…
Learning a universal policy across different robot morphologies can significantly improve learning efficiency and generalization in continuous control. However, it poses a challenging multi-task reinforcement learning problem, as the…
Soft robots present unique capabilities, but have been limited by the lack of scalable technologies for construction and the complexity of algorithms for efficient control and motion, which depend on soft-body dynamics, high-dimensional…