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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…
Dynamical systems see widespread use in natural sciences like physics, biology, chemistry, as well as engineering disciplines such as circuit analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and control. For simple systems, the differential…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven to be a powerful paradigm for learning complex control policy autonomously. Numerous recent applications of DRL in robotic grasping have successfully trained DRL robotic agents end-to-end,…
Visual servoing enables robotic systems to perform accurate closed-loop control, which is required in many applications. However, existing methods either require precise calibration of the robot kinematic model and cameras or use neural…
Robotic manipulation of deformable and fragile objects presents significant challenges, as excessive stress can lead to irreversible damage to the object. While existing solutions rely on accurate object models or specialized sensors and…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…
Programming by demonstration (PbD) is an effective technique for developing complex robot manipulation tasks, such as opening bottles or using human tools. In order for such tasks to generalize to new scenes, the robot needs to be able to…
Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…
Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…
Multi-robot navigation is a challenging task in which multiple robots must be coordinated simultaneously within dynamic environments. We apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to learn a decentralized end-to-end policy which maps raw…
Research in manipulation of deformable objects is typically conducted on a limited range of scenarios, because handling each scenario on hardware takes significant effort. Realistic simulators with support for various types of deformations…
Robot learning is at an inflection point, driven by rapid advancements in machine learning and the growing availability of large-scale robotics data. This shift from classical, model-based methods to data-driven, learning-based paradigms is…
Robots should learn new tasks from humans. But how do humans convey what they want the robot to do? Existing methods largely rely on humans physically guiding the robot arm throughout their intended task. Unfortunately -- as we scale up the…
Several model-based and model-free methods have been proposed for the robot trajectory learning task. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. They can usually complement each other. Many research works are trying to integrate…
Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the…
Soft robotics is a thriving branch of robotics which takes inspiration from nature and uses affordable flexible materials to design adaptable non-rigid robots. However, their flexible behavior makes these robots hard to model, which is…
Biological systems are very robust to morphological damage, but artificial systems (robots) are currently not. In this paper we present a system based on neural cellular automata, in which locomoting robots are evolved and then given the…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown remarkable performance improvements on vision-related tasks such as object detection or image segmentation. Despite their success, they generally lack the understanding of 3D objects which form the…
To enlarge the translational workspace of cable-driven robots, one common approach is to increase the number of cables. However, this introduces two challenges: (1) cable interference significantly reduces the rotational workspace, and (2)…