Related papers: Severe Damage Recovery in Evolving Soft Robots thr…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Soft robots have gained increased popularity in recent years due to their adaptability and compliance. In this paper, we use a digital twin model of cable-driven soft robots to learn control parameters in simulation. In doing so, we take…
Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…
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…
Obtaining dynamics models is essential for robotics to achieve accurate model-based controllers and simulators for planning. The dynamics models are typically obtained using model specification of the manufacturer or simple numerical…
Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or neural network architecture) using evolutionary or learning algorithms. Another but…
Control systems are at the core of every real-world robot. They are deployed in an ever-increasing number of applications, ranging from autonomous racing and search-and-rescue missions to industrial inspections and space exploration. To…
Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…
Complexity has been a recurrent research topic in cellular automata because they represent systems where complex behaviors emerge from simple local interactions. A significant amount of previous research has been conducted proposing…
In the fields of computation and neuroscience, much is still unknown about the underlying computations that enable key cognitive functions including learning, memory, abstraction and behavior. This paper proposes a mathematical and…
The use of robotics in controlled environments has flourished over the last several decades and training robots to perform tasks using control strategies developed from dynamical models of their hardware have proven very effective. However,…
Pneumatic soft everting robotic structures have the potential to facilitate human transfer tasks due to their ability to grow underneath humans without sliding friction and their utility as a flexible sling when deflated. Tubular structures…
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…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Recent advances in embodied intelligence have leveraged massive scaling of data and model parameters to master natural-language command following and multi-task control. In contrast, biological systems demonstrate an innate ability to…
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…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
Controlled execution of dynamic motions in quadrupedal robots, especially those with articulated soft bodies, presents a unique set of challenges that traditional methods struggle to address efficiently. In this study, we tackle these…
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,…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…