Related papers: The Morphology-Control Trade-Off: Insights into So…
Simultaneously evolving morphologies (bodies) and controllers (brains) of robots can cause a mismatch between the inherited body and brain in the offspring. To mitigate this problem, the addition of an infant learning period by the…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
In Evolutionary Robotics, evolutionary algorithms are used to co-optimize morphology and control. However, co-optimizing leads to different challenges: How do you optimize a controller for a body that often changes its number of inputs and…
Natural beings undergo a morphological development process of their bodies while they are learning and adapting to the environments they face from infancy to adulthood. In fact, this is the period where the most important learning…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
An embodied agent constantly influences its environment and is influenced by it. We use the sensorimotor loop to model these interactions and thereby we can quantify different information flows in the system by various information theoretic…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
The performance of industrial robotic work cells depends on optimizing various hyperparameters referring to the cell layout, such as robot base placement, tool placement, and kinematic design. Achieving this requires a bilevel optimization…
Uncertainties in contact dynamics and object geometry remain significant barriers to robust robotic manipulation. Caging mitigates these uncertainties by constraining an object's mobility without requiring precise contact modeling. However,…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
An important factor in developing control models for human-robot collaboration is how acceptable they are to their human partners. One such method for creating acceptable control models is to attempt to mimic human-like behaviour in robots…
In the context of embodied artificial intelligence, morphological computation refers to processes which are conducted by the body (and environment) that otherwise would have to be performed by the brain. Exploiting environmental and…
The collective performance or capacity of collaborative autonomous systems such as a swarm of robots is jointly influenced by the morphology and the behavior of individual systems in that collective. In that context, this paper explores how…
Morphology-control co-design concerns the coupled optimization of an agent's body structure and control policy. This problem exhibits a bi-level structure, where the control dynamically adapts to the morphology to maximize performance.…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their…
We propose to make the physical characteristics of a robot oscillate while it learns to improve its behavioral performance. We consider quantities such as mass, actuator strength, and size that are usually fixed in a robot, and show that…