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As robotics continues to advance, the need for adaptive and continuously-learning embodied agents increases, particularly in the realm of assistance robotics. Quick adaptability and long-term information retention are essential to operate…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
Machine learning, artificial intelligence and especially deep learning based approaches are often used to simplify or eliminate the burden of programming industrial robots. Using these approaches robots inherently learn a skill instead of…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
The light and soft characteristics of Buoyancy Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit (BALLU) robots have a great potential to provide intrinsically safe interactions in environments involving humans, unlike many heavy and rigid robots. However,…
The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle's…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Mobile devices' user interfaces are still quite similar to traditional interfaces offered by desktop computers, but those can be highly problematic when used in a mobile context. Human gesture recognition in mobile interaction appears as an…
The design of intelligent materials often draws parallels with the complex adaptive behaviors of biological organisms, where robust functionality stems from sophisticated hierarchical organization and emergent long-distance coordination…
Embodied intelligence aims to enable robots to learn, reason, and generalize robustly across complex real-world environments. However, existing approaches often struggle with partial observability, fragmented spatial reasoning, and…
Living microorganisms have evolved dedicated sensory machinery to detect environmental perturbations, processing these signals through biochemical networks to guide behavior. Replicating such capabilities in synthetic active matter remains…
Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is…
Embedding magnetic colloidal particles in an elastic polymer matrix leads to smart soft materials that can reversibly be addressed from outside by external magnetic fields. We discover a pronounced nonlinear superelastic stress-strain…
Crumpling an ordinary thin sheet transforms it into a structure with unusual mechanical behaviors, such as enhanced rigidity, emission of crackling noise, slow relaxations, and memory retention. A central challenge in explaining these…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Many practically relevant materials combine properties of viscous fluids and elastic solids to viscoelastic behavior. Our focus is on the induced dynamic behavior of damped finite-sized particulate inclusions in such substances. We…
With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft…
Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or neural network architecture) using evolutionary or learning algorithms. Another but…