Related papers: Morphological Symmetries in Robotics
Physics simulation is ubiquitous in robotics. Whether in model-based approaches (e.g., trajectory optimization), or model-free algorithms (e.g., reinforcement learning), physics simulators are a central component of modern control pipelines…
The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
The dominant paradigm for end-to-end robot learning focuses on optimizing task-specific objectives that solve a single robotic problem such as picking up an object or reaching a target position. However, recent work on high-capacity models…
Living systems exhibit complex yet organized behavior on multiple spatiotemporal scales. To investigate the nature of multiscale coordination in living systems, one needs a meaningful and systematic way to quantify the complex dynamics, a…
Social robots are becoming increasingly diverse in their design, behavior, and usage. In this chapter, we provide a broad-ranging overview of the main characteristics that arise when one considers social robots and their interactions with…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
Imitation can allow us to quickly gain an understanding of a new task. Through a demonstration, we can gain direct knowledge about which actions need to be performed and which goals they have. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to…
Continuum robots with floating bases demonstrate exceptional operational capabilities in confined spaces, such as those encountered in medical surgeries and equipment maintenance. However, developing low-cost solutions for their motion and…
High performance trajectory tracking control of quadrotor vehicles is an important challenge in aerial robotics. Symmetry is a fundamental property of physical systems and offers the potential to provide a tool to design high-performance…
A complete geometric classification of symmetries of autonomous Hamiltonian mechanical systems is established; explaining how to obtain their associated conserved quantities in all cases. In particular, first we review well-known results…
Mobile robots require basic information to navigate through an environment: they need to know where they are (localization) and they need to know where they are going. For the latter, robots need a map of the environment. Using sensors of a…
The traditional distributed model of autonomous, homogeneous, mobile point robots usually assumes that the robots do not create any visual obstruction for the other robots, i.e., the robots are see through. In this paper, we consider a…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Legged robot research is presently focused on bipedal or quadrupedal robots, despite capabilities to build robots with many more legs to potentially improve locomotion performance. This imbalance is not necessarily due to hardware…
Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…
Continuum robots are typically slender and flexible with infinite freedoms in theory, which poses a challenge for their control and application. The shape sensing of continuum robots is vital to realise accuracy control. This letter…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…