Related papers: Towards a Robust Soft Baby Robot With Rich Interac…
Many people suffer from the loss of a limb. Learning to get by without an arm or hand can be very challenging, and existing prostheses do not yet fulfil the needs of individuals with amputations. One promising solution is to provide greater…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
This paper presents a new learning framework that leverages the knowledge from imitation learning, deep reinforcement learning, and control theories to achieve human-style locomotion that is natural, dynamic, and robust for humanoids. We…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
Balancing and push-recovery are essential capabilities enabling humanoid robots to solve complex locomotion tasks. In this context, classical control systems tend to be based on simplified physical models and hard-coded strategies. Although…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
Recently, humanoid robots have made significant advances in their ability to perform challenging tasks due to the deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL), however, the inherent complexity of humanoid robots, including the difficulty of…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Designing soft robots is a complex and iterative process that demands cross-disciplinary expertise in materials science, mechanics, and control, often relying on intuition and extensive experimentation. While foundation models, especially…
Robots capable of performing manipulation tasks in a broad range of missions in unstructured environments can develop numerous applications to impact and enhance human life. Existing work in robot learning has shown success in applying…
Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…
Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or neural network architecture) using evolutionary or learning algorithms. Another but…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
We present a new approach to robot hand design specifically suited for successfully implementing robot learning methods to accomplish tasks in daily human environments. We introduce BaRiFlex, an innovative gripper design that alleviates the…
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…