Related papers: Co-optimizing Physical Reconfiguration Parameters …
Humans and animals are capable of quickly learning new behaviours to solve new tasks. Yet, we often forget that they also rely on a highly specialized morphology that co-adapted with motor control throughout thousands of years. Although…
In robotic deformable object manipulation (DOM) applications, constraints arise commonly from environments and task-specific requirements. Enabling DOM with constraints is therefore crucial for its deployment in practice. However, dealing…
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,…
Safe and compliant control of dynamic systems in interaction with the environment, e.g., in shared workspaces, continues to represent a major challenge. Mismatches in the dynamic model of the robots, numerical singularities, and the…
For robot manipulation, both the controller and end-effector design are crucial. Soft grippers are generalizable by deforming to different geometries, but designing such a gripper and finding its grasp pose remains challenging. In this…
Robot manipulation in cluttered environments often requires complex and sequential rearrangement of multiple objects in order to achieve the desired reconfiguration of the target objects. Due to the sophisticated physical interactions…
Underactuated robots are characterized by a larger number of degrees of freedom than actuators and if they are designed with a specific mass distribution, they can be controlled by means of differential flatness theory. This structural…
Origami-inspired mechanisms can transform flat sheets into functional three-dimensional dynamic structures that are lightweight, compact, and capable of complex motion. These properties make origami increasingly valuable in robotic and…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
Constraint-based control approaches offer a flexible way to specify robotic manipulation tasks and execute them on robots with many degrees of freedom. However, the specification of task constraints and their associated priorities usually…
The coupling of human movement dynamics with the function and design of wearable assistive devices is vital to better understand the interaction between the two. Advanced neuromuscular models and optimal control formulations provide the…
Vine-inspired robots achieve large workspace coverage through tip eversion, enabling safe navigation in confined and cluttered environments. However, their deployment in free space is fundamentally limited by low axial stiffness, poor…
When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…
The use of origami in engineering has significantly expanded in recent years, spanning deployable structures across scales, folding robotics, and mechanical metamaterials. However, finding foldable paths can be a formidable task as the…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Modular robots can be tailored to achieve specific tasks and rearranged to achieve previously infeasible ones. The challenge is choosing an appropriate design from a large search space. In this work, we describe a framework that…
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…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
This paper describes a novel approach in human robot interaction driven by ergonomics. With a clear focus on optimising ergonomics, the approach proposed here continuously observes a human user's posture and by invoking appropriate…
Robots often need to be reconfigurable$-$to customize, calibrate, or optimize robots operating in varying environments with different hardware). A particular challenge in robotics is the automated and dynamic reconfiguration to load and…