Related papers: Cybroc: Cyborgizing Broccoli for Longevity
Rollator walkers allow people with physical limitations to increase their mobility and give them the confidence and independence to participate in society for longer. However, rollator walker users often have poor posture, leading to…
Structured populations are ubiquitous across the biological sciences. Mathematical models of these populations allow us to understand how individual physiological traits drive the overall dynamics in aggregate. For example, linear age- or…
This paper addresses the question of how to increase the acceptability of a robot hug and whether such a hug contributes to well-being. It combines the lead author's own research with pioneering research by Alexis E. Block and Katherine J.…
One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
We present SMPLOlympics, a collection of physically simulated environments that allow humanoids to compete in a variety of Olympic sports. Sports simulation offers a rich and standardized testing ground for evaluating and improving the…
Biological aging is characterized by an age-dependent increase in the probability of death and by a decrease in the reproductive capacity. Individual age-dependent rates of survival and reproduction have a strong impact on population…
Kitchen appliances are frequently used domestic artifacts situated at the point of everyday dietary decision making, making them a promising but underexplored site for health promotion. We explore the concept of relational appliances:…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
Quadrupedal robots are skillful at locomotion tasks while lacking manipulation skills, not to mention dexterous manipulation abilities. Inspired by the animal behavior and the duality between multi-legged locomotion and multi-fingered…
Artificially evolving foraging behavior in simulated legged animals has proved to be a notoriously difficult task. Here, we co-evolve the morphology and controller for virtual organisms in a three-dimensional physically realistic…
Evolution is the process of optimal adaptation of biological populations to their living environments. This is expressed via the concept of fitness, defined as relative reproductive success. However, it has been pointed out that this…
This paper presents a concurrent whole-body control (cWBC) for human-exoskeleton systems that are tightly coupled at a Cartesian level (e.g., feet, hands, torso). The exoskeleton generates joint torques that i) cancel the effects of gravity…
Jellyfish cyborgs present a promising avenue for soft robotic systems, leveraging the natural energy-efficiency and adaptability of biological systems. Here we demonstrate a novel approach to predicting and controlling jellyfish locomotion…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
The idea of symbolic controllers tries to bridge the gap between the top-down manual design of the controller architecture, as advocated in Brooks' subsumption architecture, and the bottom-up designer-free approach that is now standard…
Realizing versatile and human-like performance in high-demand sports like badminton remains a formidable challenge for humanoid robotics. Unlike standard locomotion or static manipulation, this task demands a seamless integration of…
We present some existence results for three-dimensional quasistatic morphoelasticity. The state of the growing body is described by its deformation and the underlying growth tensor and is ruled by the interplay of hyperelastic energy…
Traditional e-commerce recommender systems primarily optimize for user engagement and purchase likelihood, often neglecting the rigid physiological constraints required for human health. Standard collaborative filtering algorithms are…
As a result of evolution, many biological materials have developed irregular structures that lead to outstanding mechanical properties, like high stiffness-to-weight ratios and good energy absorption. To reproduce these properties in…