Related papers: On Designing a Learning Robot: Improving Morpholog…
Embodied intelligence has witnessed remarkable progress in recent years, driven by advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and the rise of large-scale multimodal models. Among its core challenges, robot manipulation stands…
The robot development process is divided into several stages, which create barriers to the exchange of information between these different stages. We advocate for an interactive lifecycle representation, extending from robot morphology…
Robots can provide assistance to a human by moving objects to locations around the person's body. With a well chosen initial configuration, a robot can better reach locations important to an assistive task despite model error, pose…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
Human safety is the most important demand for human robot interaction and collaboration (HRIC), which not only refers to physical safety, but also includes psychological safety. Although many robots with different configurations have…
Whole-body control (WBC) has demonstrated significant advantages in complex interactive movements of high-dimensional robotic systems. However, when a robot is required to handle dynamic multi-contact combinations along a single kinematic…
Robotic arms are highly common in various automation processes such as manufacturing lines. However, these highly capable robots are usually degraded to simple repetitive tasks such as pick-and-place. On the other hand, designing an optimal…
Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and…
Ergonomics is a key factor to consider when designing control architectures for effective physical collaborations between humans and humanoid robots. In contrast, ergonomic indexes are often overlooked in the robot design phase, which leads…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
Occlusions caused by a robot's own body is a common problem for closed-loop control methods employed in eye-to-hand camera setups. We propose an optimization-based reactive controller that minimizes self-occlusions while achieving a desired…
The prototypical approach to reinforcement learning involves training policies tailored to a particular agent from scratch for every new morphology. Recent work aims to eliminate the re-training of policies by investigating whether a…
Continuum robots, which often rely on interdisciplinary and multimedia collaborations, have been increasingly recognized for their potential to revolutionize the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) in varied applications due to their…
We introduce LOKI, a compute-efficient framework for co-designing morphologies and control policies that generalize across unseen tasks. Inspired by biological adaptation -- where animals quickly adjust to morphological changes -- our…
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit a wide range of capabilities, such as writing robot code from language commands -- enabling non-experts to direct robot behaviors, modify them based on feedback, or compose them to…
We present a method for efficient learning of control policies for multiple related robotic motor skills. Our approach consists of two stages, joint training and specialization training. During the joint training stage, a neural network…
Our goal in this work is to expand the theory and practice of robot locomotion by addressing critical challenges associated with the robotic biomimicry of bat aerial locomotion. Bats are known for their pronounced, fast wing articulations,…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…
We introduce MORPH, a method for co-optimization of hardware design parameters and control policies in simulation using reinforcement learning. Like most co-optimization methods, MORPH relies on a model of the hardware being optimized,…
The use of autonomous robots for delivery of goods to customers is an exciting new way to provide a reliable and sustainable service. However, in the real world, autonomous robots still require human supervision for safety reasons. We…