Related papers: The Morphology-Control Trade-Off: Insights into So…
Evolving morphologies and controllers of robots simultaneously leads to a problem: Even if the parents have well-matching bodies and brains, the stochastic recombination can break this match and cause a body-brain mismatch in their…
Soft robotics has emerged as the standard solution for grasping deformable objects, and has proven invaluable for mobile robotic exploration in extreme environments. However, despite this growth, there are no widely adopted computational…
Recent advancements in robotics have increased the possibilities for integrating robotic systems into human-involved workplaces, highlighting the need to examine and optimize human-robot coordination in collaborative settings. This study…
A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of links,…
Morphology of a robot design is important to its ability to achieve a stated goal and therefore applying machine learning approaches that incorporate morphology in the design space can provide scope for significant advantage. Our study is…
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…
Soft robotics are increasingly favoured in specific applications such as healthcare, due to their adaptability, which stems from the non-linear properties of their building materials. However, these properties also pose significant…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Grasping mechanisms must both create and subsequently hold grasps that permit safe and effective object manipulation. Existing mechanisms address the different functional requirements of grasp creation and grasp holding using a single…
Morphological development is part of the way any human or animal learns. The learning processes starts with the morphology at birth and progresses through changing morphologies until adulthood is reached. Biologically, this seems to…
We explore task tolerances, i.e., allowable position or rotation inaccuracy, as an important resource to facilitate smooth and effective telemanipulation. Task tolerances provide a robot flexibility to generate smooth and feasible motions;…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
This paper presents a topology-inspired morphological descriptor for soft continuum robots by combining a pseudo-rigid-body (PRB) model with Morse theory to achieve a quantitative characterization of robot morphologies. By counting critical…
The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control,…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…