Related papers: Neural Approaches to Co-Optimization in Robotics
The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
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,…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
Designing multi-agent robotic systems requires reasoning across tightly coupled decisions spanning heterogeneous domains, including robot design, fleet composition, and planning. Much effort has been devoted to isolated improvements in…
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…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Several interesting problems in multi-robot systems can be cast in the framework of distributed optimization. Examples include multi-robot task allocation, vehicle routing, target protection, and surveillance. While the theoretical analysis…
With continual advancements in technology, efforts to develop robots simulating human behavior have intensified. Cognitive robotics, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), has proven effective in surveying and research analysis.…
Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
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…
Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…
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…
Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…
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…
Human-robot interactions have been recognized to be a key element of future industrial collaborative robots (co-robots). Unlike traditional robots that work in structured and deterministic environments, co-robots need to operate in highly…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…