Related papers: Self-Organized Construction by Minimal Surprise

Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…

Humans have an impressive ability to solve complex coordination problems in a fully distributed manner. This ability, if learned as a set of distributed multirobot coordination strategies, can enable programming large groups of robots to…

This study proposes an event-based reconfiguration control to navigate a robot swarm through challenging environments with narrow passages such as valleys, tunnels, and corridors. The robot swarm is modeled as an undirected graph, where…

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…

Trained humans exhibit highly agile spatial skills, enabling them to operate vehicles with complex dynamics in demanding tasks and conditions. Prior work shows that humans achieve this performance by using strategies such as satisficing,…

In situations where humans and robots are moving in the same space whilst performing their own tasks, predictable paths taken by mobile robots can not only make the environment feel safer, but humans can also help with the navigation in the…

Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…

Home robots may come with many sophisticated built-in abilities, however there will always be a degree of customization needed for each user and environment. Ideally this should be accomplished through one-shot learning, as collecting the…

In robot navigation, generalizing quickly to unseen environments is essential. Hierarchical methods inspired by human navigation have been proposed, typically consisting of a high-level landmark proposer and a low-level controller. However,…

Robotic assembly planning enables architects to explicitly account for the assembly process during the design phase, and enables efficient building methods that profit from the robots' different capabilities. Previous work has addressed…

We present a geometric design rule for size-controlled clustering of self-propelled particles. We show that active particles that tend to rotate under an external force have an intrinsic, signed parameter with units of curvature which we…

A number of coordinated behaviors have been proposed for achieving specific tasks for multi-robot systems. However, since most applications require more than one such behavior, one needs to be able to compose together sequences of behaviors…

The pattern formation task is commonly seen in a multi-robot system. In this paper, we study the problem of forming complex shapes with functionally limited mobile robots, which have to rely on other robots to precisely locate themselves.…

Humanoid robots are well suited for human habitats due to their morphological similarity, but developing controllers for them is a challenging task that involves multiple sub-problems, such as control, planning and perception. In this…

This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…

This paper studies collaboration through the cloud in the context of cooperative adaptive control for robot manipulators. We first consider the case of multiple robots manipulating a common object through synchronous centralized update laws…

We investigate the scenario that a robot needs to reach a designated goal after taking a sequence of appropriate actions in a non-static environment that is partially structured. One application example is to control a marine vehicle to…

In robotics, ensuring that autonomous systems are comprehensible and accountable to users is essential for effective human-robot interaction. This paper introduces a novel approach that integrates user-centered design principles directly…

Swarm Robotics is an emerging field of adapting the phenomenon of natural swarms to robotics. It is a study of robots that are aimed to mimic natural swarms, like ants and birds, to form a system that is scalable, flexible, and robust.…

Autonomous robots that are capable of operating safely in the presence of imperfect model knowledge or external disturbances are vital in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we present a planner-agnostic framework to design and…