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We present a system enabling a modular robot to autonomously build structures in order to accomplish high-level tasks. Building structures allows the robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of tasks it can perform. This…

In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…

Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…

As robots are increasingly deployed in diverse application domains, enabling robust mobility across different embodiments has become a critical challenge. Classical mobility stacks, though effective on specific platforms, require extensive…

Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…

Continuous control tasks often involve high-dimensional, dynamic, and non-linear environments. State-of-the-art performance in these tasks is achieved through complex closed-box policies that are effective, but suffer from an inherent…

Applications in machine learning, optimization, and control require the sequential selection of a few system elements, such as sensors, data, or actuators, to optimize the system performance across multiple time steps. However, in…

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing…

Though robot learning is often formulated in terms of discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDPs), physical robots require near-continuous multiscale feedback control. Machines operate on multiple asynchronous sensing modalities, each…

This paper introduces collaborating robots which provide the possibility of enhanced task performance, high reliability and decreased. Collaborating-bots are a collection of mobile robots able to self-assemble and to self-organize in order…

Snakes are a remarkable evolutionary success story. Many snake-inspired robots have been proposed over the years. Soft robotic snakes (SRS) with their continuous and smooth bending capability better mimic their biological counterparts'…

Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…

Designing effective embodied multi-agent systems is critical for solving complex real-world tasks across domains. Due to the complexity of multi-agent embodied systems, existing methods fail to automatically generate safe and efficient…

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…

Soft actor-critic (SAC) in reinforcement learning is expected to be one of the next-generation robot control schemes. Its ability to maximize policy entropy would make a robotic controller robust to noise and perturbation, which is useful…

An agent's functionality is largely determined by its design, i.e., skeletal structure and joint attributes (e.g., length, size, strength). However, finding the optimal agent design for a given function is extremely challenging since the…

Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…

Multi-task learning is a very challenging problem in reinforcement learning. While training multiple tasks jointly allow the policies to share parameters across different tasks, the optimization problem becomes non-trivial: It remains…

The objective of this work is to augment the basic abilities of a robot by learning to use sensorimotor primitives to solve complex long-horizon manipulation problems. This requires flexible generative planning that can combine primitive…

Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…