Related papers: No-brainer: Morphological Computation driven Adapt…
Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…
Soft robots have proven to outperform traditional robots in applications related to propagation in geometrically constrained environments. Designing these robots and their controllers is an intricate task, since their building materials…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
Humans and animals are capable of quickly learning new behaviours to solve new tasks. Yet, we often forget that they also rely on a highly specialized morphology that co-adapted with motor control throughout thousands of years. Although…
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Biomimetic entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Magnetic soft robots have attracted growing interest due to their unique advantages in terms of untethered actuation and excellent controllability. However, finding the required magnetization patterns or magnetic fields to achieve the…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
Intelligent biological systems are characterized by their embodiment in a complex environment and the intimate interplay between their nervous systems and the nonlinear mechanical properties of their bodies. This coordination, in which the…
In this study, we investigate how a robot can generate novel and creative actions from its own experience of learning basic actions. Inspired by a machine learning approach to computational creativity, we propose a dynamic neural network…
In social robotics, endowing humanoid robots with the ability to generate bodily expressions of affect can improve human-robot interaction and collaboration, since humans attribute, and perhaps subconsciously anticipate, such traces to…
Intelligence lies not only in the brain (decision-making processes) but in the body (physical morphology). The morphology of robots can significantly influence how they interact with the physical world, crucial for manipulating objects in…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
We present a framework for learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables the robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. The learning takes place completely automatically, without any…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
Animals achieve sophisticated behavioral control through dynamic coupling of the brain, body, and environment. Accordingly, the co-design approach, in which both the controllers and the physical properties are optimized simultaneously, has…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…