Related papers: A Jellyfish Cyborg: Exploiting Natural Embodied In…
Mathematical and experimental studies of the flows generated by jellyfish have focused primarily on mechanisms of swimming. More recent work has also considered the fluid dynamics of feeding from currents generated during swimming. Here the…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…
Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals across different species to share the same narrow design space for optimal high-efficient and energy-saving locomotion, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate…
In this work, we propose a gesture based language to allow humans to interact with robots using their body in a natural way. We have created a new gesture detection model using neural networks and a custom dataset of humans performing a set…
Robotics and automation are key enablers to increase throughput in ongoing conservation efforts across various threatened ecosystems. Cataloguing, digitisation, husbandry, and similar activities require the ability to interact with…
Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in…
The development of novel autonomous underwater gliders has been hindered by limited shape diversity, primarily due to the reliance on traditional design tools that depend heavily on manual trial and error. Building an automated design…
Softening and onboarding computers and controllers is one of the final frontiers in soft robotics towards their robustness and intelligence for everyday use. In this regard, embodying soft and physical computing presents exciting potential.…
Autonomous underwater robots are increasingly deployed for environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, subsea resource exploration, and long-horizon exploration. Yet, despite rapid advances in learning-based planning and control,…
Soft robots have drawn great interest due to their ability to take on a rich range of shapes and motions, compared to traditional rigid robots. However, the motions, and underlying statics and dynamics, pose significant challenges to…
Over the past few decades, biomimetic robotic experiments have significantly advanced our understanding of undulatory swimming. Compared to animal experiments, robotic experiments offer repeatability and controlled parameter variations, but…
It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely…
Fish have endured millions of years of evolution, and their distinct rigid-flexible body structures offer inspiration for overcoming challenges in underwater robotics, such as limited mobility, high energy consumption, and adaptability.…
In nature, flocking or swarm behavior is observed in many species as it has beneficial properties like reducing the probability of being caught by a predator. In this paper, we propose SELFish (Swarm Emergent Learning Fish), an approach…
As robots increasingly integrate into everyday environments, ensuring their safe navigation around humans becomes imperative. Efficient and safe motion planning requires robots to account for human behavior, particularly in constrained…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…
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…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Natural swimmers rely for their survival on sensors that gather information from the environment and guide their actions. The spatial organization of these sensors, such as the visual fish system and lateral line, suggests evolutionary…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…