Related papers: Emergent functional dynamics of link-bots

Robots interacting with humans must be safe, reactive and adapt online to unforeseen environmental and task changes. Achieving these requirements concurrently is a challenge as interactive planners lack formal safety guarantees, while safe…

While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…

Spontaneous low-frequency oscillations on the order of several hertz are the drivers of many crucial processes in nature. From bacterial swimming to mammal gaits, the conversion of static energy inputs into slowly oscillating electrical and…

Collective behavior in animals has long been modeled through self-propelled particle models, which reproduce striking group-level phenomena through abstract interaction forces. Yet these models are fundamentally descriptive: they leave open…

These lecture notes are designed to provide a brief introduction into the phenomenology of active matter and to present some of the analytical tools used to rationalize the emergent behavior of active systems. Such systems are made of…

Intelligent robots are redefining a multitude of critical domains but are still far from being fully capable of assisting human peers in day-to-day tasks. An important requirement of collaboration is for each teammate to maintain and…

Active swarms, consisting of individual agents which consume energy to move or produce work, are known to generate a diverse range of collective behaviors. Many examples of active swarms are biological in nature (e.g., fish shoals and bird…

Programming physical intelligence into mechanisms holds great promise for machines that can accomplish tasks such as navigation of unstructured environments while utilizing a minimal amount of computational resources and electronic…

Compared to conventional wheeled transportation systems designed for flat surfaces, soft robots exhibit exceptional adaptability to various terrains, enabling stable movement in complex environments. However, due to the risk of collision…

A hyper-redundant robotic arm is a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, capable of executing tasks in cluttered environments where robotic arms with fewer degrees of freedom are unable to operate. This paper introduces a new method for…

With momentum increasing in the use of social robots as long-term assistive and collaborative partners, humans developing social bonds with these artificial agents appears to be inevitable. In human-human dyads, social bonding plays a…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

Motivated by the recent interest in cyber-physical and autonomous robotic systems, we study the problem of dynamically coupled multi-agent systems under a set of signal temporal logic tasks. In particular, the satisfaction of each of these…

Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…

Understanding the mechanisms behind emergent behaviors in multi-agent systems is critical for advancing fields such as swarm robotics and artificial intelligence. In this study, we investigate how neural networks evolve to control agents'…

Revealing physical interactions in complex systems from observed collective dynamics constitutes a fundamental inverse problem in science. Current reconstruction methods require access to a system's model or dynamical data at a level of…

Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…

We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, in which a robot and a user collaboratively move an object to a goal pose. In the absence of explicit communication, this problem is challenging because it demands tight implicit coordination…

Animal and robotic collective behaviours can exhibit complex dynamics that require multi-level descriptions. Here, we are interested in developing a multi-level modeling framework for the use of robots in studies about animal collective…

Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…