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Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…

Crocodiles, known as one of the oldest and most resilient species on Earth, have demonstrated remarkable locomotor abilities both on land and in water, evolving over millennia to adapt to diverse environments. In this paper, we draw…

Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…

A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…

Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…

The automatic design of embodied agents (e.g. robots) has existed for 31 years and is experiencing a renaissance of interest in the literature. To date however, the field has remained narrowly focused on two kinds of anatomically simple…

As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…

Learning requires both study and curiosity. A good learner is not only good at extracting information from the data given to it, but also skilled at finding the right new information to learn from. This is especially true when a human…

For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…

The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…

This paper explores the concept of reflexive actuation, examining how robots may leverage both internal and external stimuli to trigger changes in the motion, performance, or physical characteristics of the robot, such as its size, shape,…

Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…

Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement…

Cognitive Psychology and related disciplines have identified several critical mechanisms that enable intelligent biological agents to learn to solve complex problems. There exists pressing evidence that the cognitive mechanisms that enable…

Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…

This paper addresses the design and development of an autonomous biped robot using master and worker combination of controllers. In addition, the bot is wirelessly controllable. The work presented here explains the walking pattern, system…

Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…

We try to perform geometrization of psychology by representing mental states, <<ideas>>, by points of a metric space, <<mental space>>. Evolution of ideas is described by dynamical systems in metric mental space. We apply the mental space…

Legged robots have great potential to perform loco-manipulation tasks, yet it is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the environment. In this paper we study the use of additional contact points for maximising the…