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Deformable linear objects (e.g., cables, ropes, and threads) commonly appear in our everyday lives. However, perception of these objects and the study of physical interaction with them is still a growing area. There have already been…

Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…

We address the challenge of reliable and accurate proprioception in soft robots, specifically those with tight packaging constraints and relying only on internally embedded sensors. While various sensing approaches with single sensors have…

The objective of this work is to expand upon previous works, considering socially acceptable behaviours within robot navigation and interaction, and allow a robot to closely approach static and dynamic individuals or groups. The space…

This paper presents a novel contact-implicit trajectory optimization method using an analytically solvable contact model to enable planning of interactions with hard, soft, and slippery environments. Specifically, we propose a novel contact…

The success of soft robots in displaying emergent behaviors is tightly linked to the compliant interaction with the environment. However, to exploit such phenomena, proprioceptive sensing methods which do not hinder their softness are…

We address the problem of controlling a mobile robot to explore a partially known environment. The robot's objective is the maximization of the amount of information collected about the environment. We formulate the problem as a partially…

Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the…

This paper presents a novel approach to modeling curiosity in a mobile robot, which is useful for monitoring and adaptive data collection tasks, especially in the context of long term autonomous missions where pre-programmed missions are…

Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…

Continuum soft robots, composed of flexible materials, exhibit theoretically infinite degrees of freedom, enabling notable adaptability in unstructured environments. Cosserat Rod Theory has emerged as a prominent framework for modeling…

Soft mobile robots have emerged as a promising area of research with potential applications in various disciplines including but not limited to search-and-rescue, service, surveillance, explorations, and manufacturing. In this article, we…

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…

Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be…

This research paper addresses the challenges of exploration and navigation in unknown environments from an evolutionary swarm robotics perspective. Path formation plays a crucial role in enabling cooperative swarm robots to accomplish these…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

We consider the problem of navigating a mobile robot towards a target in an unknown environment that is endowed with visual sensors, where neither the robot nor the sensors have access to global positioning information and only use…

Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for soft robot shape formation and morphing using approximate distance fields. The method uses concepts from constructive solid geometry, R-functions, to construct an approximate distance function…

Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…