Related papers: Rapid Co-design of Task-Specialized Whegged Robots…

Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space…

We present a computational design system that assists users to model, optimize, and fabricate quad-robots with soft skins.Our system addresses the challenging task of predicting their physical behavior by fully integrating the multibody…

In nature, animals with exceptional locomotion abilities, such as cougars, often possess asymmetric fore and hind legs. This observation inspired us: could optimizing the leg length of quadruped robots endow them with similar locomotive…

Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…

Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…

Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…

This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…

Selecting robot design parameters can be challenging since these parameters are often coupled with the performance of the controller and, therefore, the resulting capabilities of the robot. This leads to a time-consuming and often expensive…

Designing cyber-physical systems is a complex task which requires insights at multiple abstraction levels. The choices of single components are deeply interconnected and need to be jointly studied. In this work, we consider the problem of…

When designing autonomous systems, we need to consider multiple trade-offs at various abstraction levels, and the choices of single (hardware and software) components need to be studied jointly. In this work we consider the problem of…

The co-adaptation of robots has been a long-standing research endeavour with the goal of adapting both body and behaviour of a system for a given task, inspired by the natural evolution of animals. Co-adaptation has the potential to…

Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…

We present an approach to task scheduling in heterogeneous multi-robot systems. In our setting, the tasks to complete require diverse skills. We assume that each robot is multi-skilled, i.e., each robot offers a subset of the possible…

Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…

Co-design optimisation of autonomous systems has emerged as a powerful alternative to sequential approaches by jointly optimising physical design and control strategies. However, existing frameworks often neglect the robustness required for…

In this paper, we present a hardware-control co-design approach that enables efficient and versatile roller skating on quadrupedal robots equipped with passive wheels. Passive-wheel skating reduces leg inertia and improves energy…

We compare two representations used to define the morphology of legs for a hexapod robot, which are subsequently 3D printed. A leg morphology occupies a set of voxels in a voxel grid. One method, a direct representation, uses a collection…

Designing aerial robots for specialized tasks, from perching to payload delivery, requires tailoring their aerodynamic shape to specific mission requirements. For tasks involving wide flight envelopes, the usual sequential process of first…

We present parametric trajectory optimization, a method for simultaneously computing physical parameters, actuation requirements, and robot motions for more efficient robot designs. In this scheme, robot dimensions, masses, and other…

The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…