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The light and soft characteristics of Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit (BALLU) robots have a great potential to provide intrinsically safe interactions in environments involving humans, unlike many heavy and rigid robots. However,…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
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…
Advances in computer vision and machine learning enable robots to perceive their surroundings in powerful new ways, but these perception modules have well-known fragilities. We consider the problem of synthesizing a safe controller that is…
Long-term autonomy of robotic systems implicitly requires dependable platforms that are able to naturally handle hardware and software faults, problems in behaviors, or lack of knowledge. Model-based dependable platforms additionally…
To maintain full autonomy, autonomous robotic systems must have the ability to self-repair. Self-repairing via compensatory mechanisms appears in nature: for example, some fish can lose even 76% of their propulsive surface without loss of…
The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…
This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability,…
Many robot manipulation skills can be represented with deterministic characteristics and there exist efficient techniques for learning parameterized motor plans for those skills. However, one of the active research challenge still remains…
Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in…
The skin of humanoid robots often lacks human tactility and the inherent self-repair capability of biological tissues. Recently, researchers have grown a living, self-healing skin on a robot finger by subsequent culturing of human dermal…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
Classification and quantitative characterization of neuronal morphologies from histological neuronal reconstruction is challenging since it is still unclear how to delineate a neuronal cell class and which are the best features to define…
Legged robots have enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for…
Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance…
For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
A fundamental objective in intelligent robotics is to move towards lifelong learning robot that can learn and adapt to unseen scenarios over time. However, continually learning new tasks would introduce catastrophic forgetting problems due…
In today's world, many patients with cognitive impairments and motor dysfunction seek the attention of experts to perform specific conventional therapies to improve their situation. However, due to a lack of neurorehabilitation…