Related papers: Reflexive Input-Output Causality Mechanisms
For humans, the process of grasping an object relies heavily on rich tactile feedback. Most recent robotic grasping work, however, has been based only on visual input, and thus cannot easily benefit from feedback after initiating contact.…
Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…
Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
Self/other distinction and self-recognition are important skills for interacting with the world, as it allows humans to differentiate own actions from others and be self-aware. However, only a selected group of animals, mainly high order…
Inverted landing in a rapid and robust manner is a challenging feat for aerial robots, especially while depending entirely on onboard sensing and computation. In spite of this, this feat is routinely performed by biological fliers such as…
In order to robustly execute a task under environmental uncertainty, a robot needs to be able to reactively adapt to changes arising in its environment. The environment changes are usually reflected in deviation from expected sensory…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
Industrial manipulators do not collapse under their own weight when powered off due to the friction in their joints. Although these mechanism are effective for stiff position control of pick-and-place, they are inappropriate for legged…
The increasing level of autonomy of robots poses challenges of trust and social acceptance, especially in human-robot interaction scenarios. This requires an interpretable implementation of robotic cognitive capabilities, possibly based on…
To solve its task, a robot needs to have the ability to interpret its perceptions. In vision, this interpretation is particularly difficult and relies on the understanding of the structure of the scene, at least to the extent of its task…
An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance…
A key challenge for robotic systems is to figure out the behavior of another agent. The capability to draw correct inferences is crucial to derive human behavior from examples. Processing correct inferences is especially challenging when…
Interactive perception enables robots to manipulate the environment and objects to bring them into states that benefit the perception process. Deformable objects pose challenges to this due to significant manipulation difficulty and…
Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…
Deploying robots in human-shared spaces requires understanding interactions among nearby agents and objects. Modelling cause-and-effect relations through causal inference aids in predicting human behaviours and anticipating robot…
Modern applications of robotics typically involve a robot control system with an inner PI (proportional-integral) or PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control loop and an outer user-specified control loop. The existing outer loop…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
The uses of robots are changing from static environments in factories to encompass novel concepts such as Human-Robot Collaboration in unstructured settings. Pre-programming all the functionalities for robots becomes impractical, and hence,…