Related papers: Modular Robots: extending the capabilities of one …

Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem:…

As robotic teammates become more common in society, people will assess the robots' roles in their interactions along many dimensions. One such dimension is effectiveness: people will ask whether their robotic partners are trustworthy and…

We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational, but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role…

The effectiveness of a robot manipulation to a large extent is determined by the speed of making this or that movement needed for carrying out the task. Accordingly to this the problem of optimal robot control is often subdivided into two…

Manipulating objects with robotic hands is a complicated task. Not only the fingers of the hand, but also the pose of the robot's end effector need to be coordinated. Using human demonstrations of movements is an intuitive and…

Robots applications in our daily life increase at an unprecedented pace. As robots will soon operate "out in the wild", we must identify the safety and security vulnerabilities they will face. Robotics researchers and manufacturers focus…

We consider the problem of building an assistive robotic system that can help humans in daily household cleanup tasks. Creating such an autonomous system in real-world environments is inherently quite challenging, as a general solution may…

In the future, service robots are expected to be able to operate autonomously for long periods of time without human intervention. Many work striving for this goal have been emerging with the development of robotics, both hardware and…

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…

Recent advances in large-scale machine learning have produced high-capacity foundation models capable of adapting to a broad array of downstream tasks. While such models hold great promise for robotics, the prevailing paradigm still…

Biological systems, including human beings, have the innate ability to perform complex tasks in versatile and agile manner. Researchers in sensorimotor control have tried to understand and formally define this innate property. The idea,…

Domestic and service robots have the potential to transform industries such as health care and small-scale manufacturing, as well as the homes in which we live. However, due to the overwhelming variety of tasks these robots will be expected…

As artificial intelligence continues to advance and becomes more integrated into sensitive areas like healthcare, education, and everyday life, it's crucial for these systems to be both resilient and robust. This paper shows how resilience…

Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…

Machine learning, artificial intelligence and especially deep learning based approaches are often used to simplify or eliminate the burden of programming industrial robots. Using these approaches robots inherently learn a skill instead of…

The rise of deep learning has caused a paradigm shift in robotics research, favoring methods that require large amounts of data. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to generate such data sets on a physical platform. Therefore,…

To bring robots into human everyday life, their capacity for social interaction must increase. One way for robots to acquire social skills is by assigning them the concept of identity. This research focuses on the concept of…

As hardware and software systems have grown in complexity, formal methods have been indispensable tools for rigorously specifying acceptable behaviors, synthesizing programs to meet these specifications, and validating the correctness of…

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…

Nowadays, robots are expected to interact more physically, cognitively, and socially with people. They should adapt to unpredictable contexts alongside individuals with various behaviours. For this reason, personalisation is a valuable…