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Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
The co-adaptation of robots has been a long-standing research endeavour with the goal of adapting both body and behaviour of a system for a given task, inspired by the natural evolution of animals. Co-adaptation has the potential to…
Animals such as rabbits and birds can instantly generate locomotion behavior in reaction to a dynamic, approaching object, such as a person or a rock, despite having possibly never seen the object before and having limited perception of the…
This paper introduces a learning-based framework for robot adaptive manipulating the object with a revolute joint in unstructured environments. We concentrate our discussion on various cabinet door opening tasks. To improve the performance…
For high-performance autonomous manipulation of a payload by a mobile manipulator team, or for collaborative manipulation with the human, robots should be able to discover where other robots are attached to the payload, as well as the…
Better understanding the natural world is a crucial task with a wide range of applications. In environments with close proximity between humans and animals, such as zoos, it is essential to better understand the causes behind animal…
To traverse complex natural terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or be driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic…
A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…
Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
Mass customization and shorter manufacturing cycles are becoming more important among small and medium-sized companies. However, classical industrial robots struggle to cope with product variation and dynamic environments. In this paper, we…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
In nature, animals with exceptional locomotion abilities, such as cougars, often possess asymmetric fore and hind legs. This observation inspired us: could optimizing the leg length of quadruped robots endow them with similar locomotive…
Controlling sensori-motor systems in higher animals or complex robots is a challenging combinatorial problem, because many sensory signals need to be simultaneously coordinated into a broad behavioural spectrum. To rapidly interact with the…
Robotic grasping in cluttered environments is often infeasible due to obstacles preventing possible grasps. Then, pre-grasping manipulation like shifting or pushing an object becomes necessary. We developed an algorithm that can learn, in…
Robotic adaptation to unanticipated operating conditions is crucial to achieving persistence and robustness in complex real world settings. For a wide range of cutting-edge robotic systems, such as micro- and nano-scale robots, soft robots,…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
Physics-based manipulation in clutter involves complex interaction between multiple objects. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning, from interaction in a physics simulator, manipulation skills to solve this multi-step…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
In this paper we address the problem of robot movement adaptation under various environmental constraints interactively. Motion primitives are generally adopted to generate target motion from demonstrations. However, their generalization…