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There is a growing need for computational tools to automatically design and verify autonomous systems, especially complex robotic systems involving perception, planning, control, and hardware in the autonomy stack. Differentiable…

Designing robots by hand can be costly and time consuming, especially if the robots have to be created with novel materials, or be robust to internal or external changes. In order to create robots automatically, without the need for human…

Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…

This paper introduces the BOW Planner, a scalable motion planning algorithm designed to navigate robots through complex environments using constrained Bayesian optimization (CBO). Unlike traditional methods, which often struggle with…

This paper addresses non-prehensile rearrangement planning problems where a robot is tasked to rearrange objects among obstacles on a planar surface. We present an efficient planning algorithm that is designed to impose few assumptions on…

Pruning is an essential agricultural practice for orchards. Proper pruning can promote healthier growth and optimize fruit production throughout the orchard's lifespan. Robot manipulators have been developed as an automated solution for…

Human interaction introduces two main constraints: Safety and Comfort. Therefore service robot manipulator can't be controlled like industrial robotic manipulator where personnel is isolated from the robot's work envelope. In this paper, we…

Soft robotics has emerged as a promising field with the potential to revolutionize industries such as healthcare and manufacturing. However, designing effective soft robots presents challenges, particularly in managing the complex interplay…

While multi-joint continuum robots are highly dexterous and flexible, designing an optimal robot can be challenging due to its kinematics involving curvatures. Hence, the current work presents a computational method developed to find…

Finite element methods have been successfully used to develop physics-based models of soft robots that capture the nonlinear dynamic behavior induced by continuous deformation. These high-fidelity models are therefore ideal for designing…

Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…

Efficient motion planning algorithms are of central importance for deploying robots in the real world. Unfortunately, these algorithms often drastically reduce the dimensionality of the problem for the sake of feasibility, thereby foregoing…

Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…

Series elastic robots are best able to follow trajectories which obey the limitations of their actuators, since they cannot instantly change their joint forces. In fact, the performance of series elastic actuators can surpass that of ideal…

We propose a method for evolving solutions that are robust with respect to variations of the environmental conditions (i.e. that can operate effectively in new conditions immediately, without the need to adapt to variations). The obtained…

Soft robotic grasping has rapidly spread through the academic robotics community in recent years and pushed into industrial applications. At the same time, multimaterial 3D printing has become widely available, enabling the monolithic…

This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…

To reduce the computational cost of humanoid motion generation, we introduce a new approach to representing robot kinematic reachability: the differentiable reachability map. This map is a scalar-valued function defined in the task space…

Learning from Demonstration is increasingly used for transferring operator manipulation skills to robots. In practice, it is important to cater for limited data and imperfect human demonstrations, as well as underlying safety constraints.…

The design (shape) of a robot is usually decided before the control is implemented. This might limit how well the design is adapted to a task, as the suitability of the design is given by how well the robot performs in the task, which…