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Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Path planning and collision avoidance are challenging in complex and highly variable environments due to the limited horizon of events. In literature, there are multiple model- and learning-based approaches that require significant…
Mobile robots are often tasked with repeatedly navigating through an environment whose traversability changes over time. These changes may exhibit some hidden structure, which can be learned. Many studies consider reactive algorithms for…
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…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
There is a growing interest in building autonomous systems that interact with complex environments. The difficulty associated with obtaining an accurate model for such environments poses a challenge to the task of assessing and guaranteeing…
Humans are able to negotiate downstep behaviors -- both planned and unplanned -- with remarkable agility and ease. The goal of this paper is to systematically study the translation of this human behavior to bipedal walking robots, even if…
Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for…
Humans and animals developed a sophisticated motor control apparatus and there is much evidence that it has a modular structure. The modularity offers a range of benefits, e.g. ability to learn dissociable motion styles without interference…
Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). While autonomous navigation is fairly straight-forward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring…
Programming a robot to deal with open-ended tasks remains a challenge, in particular if the robot has to manipulate objects. Launching, grasping, pushing or any other object interaction can be simulated but the corresponding models are not…
In order to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, intelligent robots need to carry out high-level, abstract planning and reasoning in conjunction with motion planning. However, abstract models are typically lossy and plans or policies computed…
The integration of imitation and reinforcement learning has enabled remarkable advances in humanoid whole-body control, facilitating diverse human-like behaviors. However, research on environment-dependent motions remains limited. Existing…
We propose a novel framework for enhancing robotic adaptability and learning efficiency, which integrates unsupervised trajectory segmentation with adaptive probabilistic movement primitives (ProMPs). By employing a cutting-edge deep…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Soft robotics aims to develop robots able to adapt their behavior across a wide range of unstructured and unknown environments. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that nonlinear dynamics often result in complex behaviors hard…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Enabling robots to quickly learn manipulation skills is an important, yet challenging problem. Such manipulation skills should be flexible, e.g., be able adapt to the current workspace configuration. Furthermore, to accomplish complex…
Many robotic systems are underactuated, meaning not all degrees of freedom can be directly controlled due to lack of actuators, input constraints, or state-dependent actuation. This property, compounded by modeling uncertainties and…
We present an efficient algorithm for motion planning and control of a robot system with a high number of degrees-of-freedom. These include high-DOF soft robots or an articulated robot interacting with a deformable environment. Our approach…