Related papers: Embodied Design for Enhanced Flipper-Based Locomot…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
For the deployment of legged robots in real-world environments, it is essential to develop robust locomotion control methods for challenging terrains that may exhibit unexpected deformability and irregularity. In this paper, we explore the…
Operations in hazardous environments put humans, animals, and machines at high risk for physically damaging consequences. In contrast to humans and animals, quadruped robots cannot naturally identify and adjust their locomotion to a…
In lunar and planetary exploration, legged robots have attracted significant attention as an alternative to conventional wheeled robots, which struggle to traverse rough and uneven terrain. To enable locomotion over highly irregular and…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…
Elongate limbless robots have the potential to locomote through tightly packed spaces for applications such as search-and-rescue and industrial inspections. The capability to effectively and robustly maneuver elongate limbless robots is…
Natural beings undergo a morphological development process of their bodies while they are learning and adapting to the environments they face from infancy to adulthood. In fact, this is the period where the most important learning…
Geometric mechanics provides valuable insights into how biological and robotic systems use changes in shape to move by mechanically interacting with their environment. In high-friction environments it provides that the entire interaction is…
This work contributes a marsupial robotic system-of-systems involving a legged and an aerial robot capable of collaborative mapping and exploration path planning that exploits the heterogeneous properties of the two systems and the ability…
In this paper, we develop an embodied AI system for human-in-the-loop navigation with a wheeled mobile robot. We propose a direct yet effective method of monitoring the robot's current plan to detect changes in the environment that impact…
In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has attracted increasing attention due to their potential in a variety of practical applications. The application of…
Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will greatly increase opportunities for exploration into under-explored areas. Exteroceptive perception is crucial for fast and energy-efficient locomotion:…
This research introduces a novel hydrofoil-based propulsion framework for unmanned aquatic robots, inspired by the undulating locomotion observed in select aquatic species. The proposed system incorporates a camber-modulating mechanism to…
Optimizing gait stability for legged robots is a difficult problem. Even on level surfaces, effectively traversing across different textures (e.g., carpet) rests on dynamically tuning parameters in multidimensional space. Inspired by…
The field of evolutionary robotics uses principles of natural evolution to design robots. In this paper, we study the effect of adding a new module inspired by the skeletal muscle to the existing RoboGen framework: the linear actuator.…
A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…
Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles.…
Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labour shortages in factories, assist elderly at homes, and colonize new planets. While classical controllers for humanoid robots have…
Animals have remarkable abilities to adapt locomotion to different terrains and tasks. However, robots trained by means of reinforcement learning are typically able to solve only a single task and a transferred policy is usually inferior to…