Related papers: Microscopic Robots That Sense, Think, Act, and Com…
High volume production has been a prerequisite in order to invest into automation of the manufacturing process for decades. The high cost of setup and the inflexibility of classical automation meant that low batch productions, often present…
It has long been realized that neuromorphic hardware offers benefits for the domain of robotics such as low energy, low latency, as well as unique methods of learning. In aiming for more complex tasks, especially those incorporating…
The Kilobot is a widely used platform for investigation of swarm robotics. Physical Kilobots are slow moving and require frequent recalibration and charging, which significantly slows down the development cycle. Simulators can speed up the…
Human-robot collaborations have been recognized as an essential component for future factories. It remains challenging to properly design the behavior of those co-robots. Those robots operate in dynamic uncertain environment with limited…
Magnetic microrobots that swim through liquid media are of interest for minimally invasive medical procedures, bioengineering, and manufacturing. Many of the envisaged applications, such as micromanipulation and targeted cargo delivery,…
Traditional rigid underwater vehicles pose risks to delicate marine ecosystems due to high-speed propellers and rigid hulls. This paper presents BactoBot, a low-cost, soft underwater robot designed for safe and gentle marine exploration.…
Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…
Can machines truly think? This question and its answer have many implications that depend, in large part, on any number of assumptions underlying how the issue has been addressed or considered previously. A crucial question, and one that is…
Tiny aerial robots hold great promise for applications such as environmental monitoring and search-and-rescue, yet face significant control challenges due to limited onboard computing power and nonlinear dynamics. Model Predictive Control…
Microrobotics has the potential to revolutionize many applications including targeted material delivery, assembly, and surgery. The same properties that promise breakthrough solutions---small size and large populations---present unique…
This paper presents a hybrid robot cognitive architecture, CRAM, that enables robot agents to accomplish everyday manipulation tasks. It addresses five key challenges that arise when carrying out everyday activities. These include (i) the…
Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…
Machine learning is now a central part of how modern systems are built and used, powering everything from personalized recommendations to large-scale business analytics. As its role grows, organizations are facing new challenges in…
Humans have an impressive ability to solve complex coordination problems in a fully distributed manner. This ability, if learned as a set of distributed multirobot coordination strategies, can enable programming large groups of robots to…
The biologically-inspired swarm paradigm is being used to design self-organizing systems of locally interacting artificial agents. A major difficulty in designing swarms with desired characteristics is understanding the causal relation…
Microscopic robots in the bloodstream could obtain power from fuel cells using glucose and oxygen. Previous studies of small numbers of such robots operating near each other showed how robots compete with their neighbors for oxygen.…
Microscale manipulation has advanced substantially in controlled locomotion and targeted transport, yet many biomedical applications require precise and adaptive interaction with biological micro-objects. At these scales, manipulation is…
For the robots to achieve a desired behavior, we can program them directly, train them, or give them an innate driver that makes the robots themselves desire the targeted behavior. With the minimal surprise approach, we implant in our…
Neuromorphic computing takes inspiration from the brain to create energy efficient hardware for information processing, capable of highly sophisticated tasks. In this article, we make the case that building this new hardware necessitates…
Building robots is an engaging activity that provides opportunities for hands-on learning. However, traditional robot-building kits are usually costly with limited functionality due to material and technology constraints. To improve the…