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Human-robot co-carrying tasks reveal their potential in both industrial and everyday applications by leveraging the strengths of both parties. Effective control of robots in these tasks requires managing the energy level in the closed-loop…

Haptic interaction is essential for the dynamic dexterity of animals, which seamlessly switch from an impedance to an admittance behaviour using the force feedback from their proprioception. However, this ability is extremely challenging to…

Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…

In this paper, we propose an inverse-kinematics controller for a class of multi-robot systems in the scenario of sampled communication. The goal is to make a group of robots perform trajectory tracking in a coordinated way when the sampling…

Purpose of Review: This review provides an overview of the state of the art in bioinspired soft robotics with by examining advancements in actuation, functionality, modeling, and control. Recent Findings: Recent research into actuation…

How can a delivery robot navigate reliably to a destination in a new office building, with minimal prior information? To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a two-level hierarchical approach, which integrates model-free deep…

Exploration of confined spaces, such as pipelines and ducts, remains challenging for conventional rigid robots due to limited space, irregular geometry, and restricted access. Inspired by caterpillar locomotion and sensing, this paper…

For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not…

The human arm exhibits remarkable capabilities, including both explosive power and precision, which demonstrate dexterity, compliance, and robustness in unstructured environments. Developing robotic systems that emulate human-like…

Recently, learning-based controllers have been shown to push mobile robotic systems to their limits and provide the robustness needed for many real-world applications. However, only classical optimization-based control frameworks offer the…

In this paper we propose a control framework that enables robots to execute tasks persistently, i.e., over time horizons much longer than robots' battery life. This is achieved by ensuring that the energy stored in the batteries of the…

In many applications, robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured and natural environments where they encounter various types of vegetation. Vegetation presents unique challenges as a traversable obstacle, where the mechanical…

Cooperative object transport in unstructured environments remains challenging for assistive humanoids because strong, time-varying interaction forces can make tracking-centric whole-body control unreliable, especially in close-contact…

When balancing, a humanoid robot can be easily subjected to unexpected disturbances like external pushes. In these circumstances, reactive movements as steps become a necessary requirement in order to avoid potentially harmful falling…

Despite the growing interest in robot control utilizing the computation of biological neurons, context-dependent behavior by neuron-connected robots remains a challenge. Context-dependent behavior here is defined as behavior that is not the…

Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…

Behavior is characterized by sequences of goal-oriented conducts, such as food uptake, socializing and resting. Classically, one would define for each task a corresponding satisfaction level, with the agent engaging, at a given time, in the…

This paper presents an admittance controller based on the passivity theory for a powered upper-limb exoskeleton robot which is governed by the nonlinear equation of motion. Passivity allows us to include a human operator and environmental…

In this paper we consider the problem of controlling the dynamic behavior of a multi-robot system while interacting with the environment. In particular, we propose a general methodology that, by means of locally scaling inter-robot coupling…

Legibility of robot motion is critical in human-robot interaction, as it allows humans to quickly infer a robot's intended goal. Although traditional trajectory generation methods typically prioritize efficiency, they often fail to make the…