Related papers: A 'MAP' to find high-performing soft robot designs…
Topology optimization is used for the design of high-performance structures but remains fundamentally limited by its iterative nature, requiring repeated finite element analyses that prevent real-time deployment and large-scale design…
Topology optimization is an important basis for the design of components. Here, the optimal structure is found within a design space subject to boundary conditions. Thereby, the specific material law has a strong impact on the final design.…
Mechanical metamaterials have continued to offer unprecedented tunability in mechanical properties, but most designs to date have prioritized attaining high stiffness and strength while sacrificing deformability. The emergence of woven…
Safe and high-speed navigation is a key enabling capability for real world deployment of robotic systems. A significant limitation of existing approaches is the computational bottleneck associated with explicit mapping and the limited field…
Wide variety of engineering design tasks can be formulated as constrained optimization problems where the shape and topology of the domain are optimized to reduce costs while satisfying certain constraints. Several mathematical approaches…
The design of periodic nanostructures allows to tailor the transport of photons, phonons, and matter waves for specific applications. Recent years have seen a further expansion of this field by engineering topological properties. However,…
Maps provide robots with crucial environmental knowledge, thereby enabling them to perform interactive tasks effectively. Easily accessing accurate abstract-to-detailed geometric and semantic concepts from maps is crucial for robots to make…
Many language-guided robotic systems rely on collapsing spatial reasoning into discrete points, making them brittle to perceptual noise and semantic ambiguity. To address this challenge, we propose RoboMAP, a framework that represents…
Exploration systems are critical for enhancing the autonomy of robots. Due to the unpredictability of the future planning space, existing methods either adopt an inefficient greedy strategy or require a lot of resources to obtain a global…
Topology optimization enables the design of highly efficient and complex structures, but conventional iterative methods, such as SIMP-based approaches, often suffer from high computational costs and sensitivity to initial conditions.…
With the increasing integration of robots into human life, their role in architectural spaces where people spend most of their time has become more prominent. While motion capabilities and accurate localization for automated robots have…
The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
The field of optimal design of linear elastic structures has seen many exciting successes that resulted in new architected materials and structural designs. With the availability of cloud computing, including high-performance computing,…
This paper presents a planning pipeline framework for locomotion in rope-assisted robots climbing vertical surfaces. The proposed framework is formulated as a bi-level optimization scheme that addresses a mixed-integer problem: selecting…
The next frontier in solar system exploration will be missions targeting extreme and rugged environments such as caves, canyons, cliffs and crater rims of the Moon, Mars and icy moons. These environments are time capsules into early…
Sampling-based algorithms are widely used for motion planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces. However, due to low sampling efficiency, their performance often diminishes in complex configuration spaces with narrow corridors.…
This paper addresses the problem of picking up only one object at a time avoiding any entanglement in bin-picking. To cope with a difficult case where the complex-shaped objects are heavily entangled together, we propose a topology-based…
In large unknown environments, search operations can be much more time-efficient with the use of multi-robot fleets by parallelizing efforts. This means robots must efficiently perform collaborative mapping (exploration) while…