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Optimal control in robotics has been increasingly popular in recent years and has been applied in many applications involving complex dynamical systems. Closed-loop optimal control strategies include model predictive control (MPC) and…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning has been shown to exhibit good performance in domains ranging from video games to simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion. However, model-free methods are known to perform poorly when the…
The development of artificial agents for social interaction pushes to enrich robots with social skills and knowledge about (local) social norms. One possibility is to distinguish the expressive and the functional orders during a human-robot…
This work aims to develop a resource-efficient solution for obstacle-avoiding tracking control of a planar snake robot in a densely cluttered environment with obstacles. Particularly, Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) has been…
A key challenge towards reliable robotic control is devising computational models that can both learn policies and guarantee robustness when deployed in the field. Inspired by the free energy principle in computational neuroscience, to…
Self-assembly of modular robotic systems enables the construction of complex robotic configurations to adapt to different tasks. This paper presents a framework for SMORES types of modular robots to efficiently self-assemble into tree…
Most reinforcement-learning (RL) controllers used in continuous control are architecturally centralized: observations are compressed into a single latent state from which both value estimates and actions are produced. Biological control…
Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (CMARL) has shown to be promising for many real-world applications. Previous works mainly focus on improving coordination ability via solving MARL-specific challenges (e.g., non-stationarity,…
As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…
Designing robotic systems that can change their physical form factor as well as their compliance to adapt to environmental constraints remains a major conceptual and technical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Granulobot, a…
We consider a warehouse in which dozens of mobile robots and human pickers work together to collect and deliver items within the warehouse. The fundamental problem we tackle, called the order-picking problem, is how these worker agents must…
Soft growing robots are novel devices that mimic plant-like growth for navigation in cluttered or dangerous environments. Their ability to adapt to surroundings, combined with advancements in actuation and manufacturing technologies, allows…
Robotic manipulation behavior should be robust to disturbances that violate high-level task-structure. Such robustness can be achieved by constantly monitoring the environment to observe the discrete high-level state of the task. This is…
Suckers are significant for robots in picking, transferring, manipulation and locomotion on diverse surfaces. However, most of the existing suckers lack high-fidelity perceptual and tactile sensing, which impedes them from resolving the…
Swarm robotics is a creative method of organizing multi-robot structures, consisting of many basic robots influenced by communal insects. The greatest astonishing attribute of swarm robots is their capacity to function together to…
Fast feedback control and safety guarantees are essential in modern robotics. We present an approach that achieves both by combining novel robust model predictive control (MPC) with function approximation via (deep) neural networks (NNs).…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Designing controllers for robot swarms is challenging, because human developers have typically no good understanding of the link between the details of a controller that governs individual robots and the swarm behavior that is an indirect…
Deep reinforcement learning has made significant progress in robotic manipulation tasks and it works well in the ideal disturbance-free environment. However, in a real-world environment, both internal and external disturbances are…
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel…