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Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Integrating Large Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains:…
The co-adaptation of robot morphology and behaviour becomes increasingly important with the advent of fast 3D-manufacturing methods and efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithms. A major challenge for the application of co-adaptation…
Magnetic response soft robot realizes programmable shape regulation with the help of magnetic field and produces various actions. The shape control of magnetic soft robot is based on the magnetic anisotropy caused by the orderly…
Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising field with the potential to revolutionize industries such as healthcare and manufacturing. However, designing effective soft robots presents challenges, particularly in managing the complex interplay…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
This paper introduces a cube-based reconfigurable robot that utilizes an electromagnet-based actuation framework to reconfigure in three dimensions via pivoting. While a variety of actuation mechanisms for self-reconfigurable robots have…
Behaviour selection has been an active research topic for robotics, in particular in the field of human-robot interaction. For a robot to interact effectively and autonomously with humans, the coupling between techniques for human activity…
Mental simulation is a critical cognitive function for goal-directed behavior because it is essential for assessing actions and their consequences. When a self-generated or externally specified goal is given, a sequence of actions that is…
In nature, biological organisms jointly evolve both their morphology and their neurological capabilities to improve their chances for survival. Consequently, task information is encoded in both their brains and their bodies. In robotics,…
When simulating soft robots, both their morphology and their controllers play important roles in task performance. This paper introduces a new method to co-evolve these two components in the same process. We do that by using the hyperNEAT…
While natural systems often present collective intelligence that allows them to self-organize and adapt to changes, the equivalent is missing in most artificial systems. We explore the possibility of such a system in the context of…