Related papers: Emergent functional dynamics of link-bots

We present a model of active particles interacting through a dynamic, heterogeneous environment, leading to emergent collective behaviors without direct agent-to-agent communication. Expanding the resource-dependent framework introduced in…

As robots increasingly become part of shared human spaces, their movements must transcend basic functionality by incorporating expressive qualities to enhance engagement and communication. This paper introduces a movement-centered design…

Many biological systems collectively construct complex, adaptive, and functional architectures, where function emerges from bottom-up building processes rather than top-down planning or centralized control. However, general strategies for…

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…

Swarm robotics is a promising approach for the coordination of large numbers of robots. While previous studies have shown that evolutionary robotics techniques can be applied to obtain robust and efficient self-organized behaviors for robot…

The successful implementation of Physical Human-Robot Interaction in industrial environments depends on ensuring safe collaboration between human operators and robotic devices. This necessitates the adoption of measures that guarantee the…

Bio-inspired multi-joint snake robots offer the advantages of terrain adaptability due to their limbless structure and high flexibility. However, a series of dozens of motor units in typical multiple-joint snake robots results in a heavy…

We present a control framework that enables humanoid robots to perform collaborative transportation tasks with a human partner. The framework supports both translational and rotational motions, which are fundamental to co-transport…

A hallmark of living systems is the ability to employ a common set of versatile building blocks that can self-organize into a multitude of different structures, in a way that can be controlled with minimal cost. This capability can only be…

Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…

Intelligent systems are increasingly part of our everyday lives and have been integrated seamlessly to the point where it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Physical manifestations of those systems on the other hand, in the form…

Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…

Conventional mobile tensegrity robots constructed with straight links offer mobility at the cost of locomotion speed. While spherical robots provide highly effective rolling behavior, they often lack the stability required for navigating…

Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…

The Industry 4.0 paradigm promises shorter development times, increased ergonomy, higher flexibility, and resource efficiency in manufacturing environments. Collaborative robots are an important tangible technology for implementing such a…

Micro- and molecular-robotic systems act as large-scale swarms. Capabilities of sensing, communication and information processing are very limited on these scales. This short position paper describes a swarm-based minimalistic approach,…

High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…

Swarm robotic systems utilize collective behaviour to achieve goals that might be too complex for a lone entity, but become attainable with localized communication and collective decision making. In this paper, a behaviour-based distributed…

To understand the structural dynamics of a large-scale social, biological or technological network, it may be useful to discover behavioral roles representing the main connectivity patterns present over time. In this paper, we propose a…

A variety of agent-based models has been proposed to account for the emergence of coordinated collective behavior of animal groups from simple interaction rules. A common, simplifying assumption of such collective movement models, is the…