Related papers: Efficient automatic design of robots

There is incremental growth in adopting self-reconfigurable robots in automating manufacturing conventional product lines. Using this class of robots adapting themselves with ever-changing environmental conditions has been acclaimed as a…

Evolutionary computation offers a variety of tools to solve complex real-world optimization problems. However, research often focuses on smaller, simplified problems and optimization algorithms that sometimes miss expectations in real-world…

We present an interactive, computational design system for creating custom robotic arms given high-level task descriptions and environmental constraints. Various task requirements can be encoded as desired motion trajectories for the robot…

Human manipulation skills represent a pinnacle of their voluntary motor functions, requiring the coordination of many degrees of freedom and processing of high-dimensional sensor input to achieve remarkable dexterity. Thus, we set out to…

Numerical optimization of complex systems benefits from the technological development of computing platforms in the last twenty years. Unfortunately, this is still not enough, and a large computational time is still necessary when…

Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…

Designing physical artifacts that serve a purpose - such as tools and other functional structures - is central to engineering as well as everyday human behavior. Though automating design has tremendous promise, general-purpose methods do…

The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot…

In trying to build humanoid robots that perform useful tasks in a world built for humans, we address the problem of autonomous locomotion. Humanoid robot planning and control algorithms for walking over rough terrain are becoming…

Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…

Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…

Laminate mechanisms are a reliable concept in producing lowcost robots for educational and commercial purposes. These mechanisms are produced using low-cost manufacturing techniques which have improved significantly during recent years and…

What we appreciate in dance is the ability of people to sponta- neously improvise new movements and choreographies, sur- rendering to the music rhythm, being inspired by the cur- rent perceptions and sensations and by previous experiences,…

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…

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…

Robotic automation is a key technology that increases the efficiency and flexibility of manufacturing processes. However, one of the challenges in deploying robots in novel environments is finding the optimal base pose for the robot, which…

Nowadays, automation not only dominates industry but becomes more and more a part of our private, everyday lives. Following the notion of increased convenience and more time for the "important things in life", automation relieves us from…

Current anthropomorphic robotic hands mainly focus on improving their dexterity by devising new mechanical structures and actuation systems. However, most of them rely on a single structure/system (e.g., bone-only) and ignore the fact that…

Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…

Efficient action prediction is of central importance for the fluent workflow between humans and equally so for human-robot interaction. To achieve prediction, actions can be encoded by a series of events, where every event corresponds to a…