Related papers: Self-Organized Construction by Minimal Surprise
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…
This paper focuses on coordinating a robot swarm orbiting a convex path without collisions among the individuals. The individual robots lack braking capabilities and can only adjust their courses while maintaining their constant but…
We consider exploration tasks in which an autonomous mobile robot incrementally builds maps of initially unknown indoor environments. In such tasks, the robot makes a sequence of decisions on where to move next that, usually, are based on…
Robots are often built from standardized assemblies, (e.g. arms, legs, or fingers), but each robot must be trained from scratch to control all the actuators of all the parts together. In this paper we demonstrate a new approach that takes a…
Collaboration requires coordination, and we coordinate by anticipating our teammates' future actions and adapting to their plan. In some cases, our teammates' actions early on can give us a clear idea of what the remainder of their plan is,…
Despite a slow neuromuscular system, humans easily outperform modern robot technology, especially in physical contact tasks. How is this possible? Biological evidence indicates that motor control of biological systems is achieved by a…
We describe an algorithm for motion planning based on expert demonstrations of a skill. In order to teach robots to perform complex object manipulation tasks that can generalize robustly to new environments, we must (1) learn a…
Intelligent robots need to generate and execute plans. In order to deal with the complexity of real environments, planning makes some assumptions about the world. When executing plans, the assumptions are usually not met. Most works have…
Cooperative task execution, a hallmark of eusociality, is enabled by local interactions between the agents and the environment through a dynamically evolving communication signal. Inspired by the collective behavior of social insects whose…
In this paper we describe a novel local algorithm for large statistical swarms using "harmonic attractor dynamics", by means of which a swarm can construct harmonics of the environment. This in turn allows the swarm to approximately…
In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question…
In this paper, we propose a novel and distributed formation control method for autonomous robots to follow the desired formation while tracking a moving target in dynamic environments. In our approach, the desired formations, which include…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
Micro- and nanorobots are often controlled by global input signals, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field. These fields move each robot maximally until it hits a stationary obstacle or another stationary robot. This paper…
This paper presents a novel planning method that achieves navigation of multi-robot formations in cluttered environments, while maintaining the formation throughout the robots motion. The method utilises a decentralised approach to find…
The safe control of multi-robot swarms is a challenging and active field of research, where common goals include maintaining group cohesion while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collision. Building off our previously…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
Self-organization is frequently observed in active collectives, from ant rafts to molecular motor assemblies. General principles describing self-organization away from equilibrium have been challenging to identify. We offer a unifying…
Swarm robotics utilises decentralised self-organising systems to form complex collective behaviours built from the bottom-up using individuals that have limited capabilities. Previous work has shown that simple occlusion-based strategies…