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As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…
The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…
The physical design of a robot and the policy that controls its motion are inherently coupled, and should be determined according to the task and environment. In an increasing number of applications, data-driven and learning-based…
In the field of robotic control, designing individual controllers for each robot leads to high computational costs. Universal control policies, applicable across diverse robot morphologies, promise to mitigate this challenge. Predominantly,…
Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…
When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…
In nature, biological organisms jointly evolve both their morphology and their neurological capabilities to improve their chances for survival. Consequently, task information is encoded in both their brains and their bodies. In robotics,…
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,…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher payload-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
Developing controllers that generalize across diverse robot morphologies remains a significant challenge in legged locomotion. Traditional approaches either create specialized controllers for each morphology or compromise performance for…
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…
Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…
Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
The design (shape) of a robot is usually decided before the control is implemented. This might limit how well the design is adapted to a task, as the suitability of the design is given by how well the robot performs in the task, which…