Related papers: Exploring environment exploitation for self-reconf…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Industrial robots are designed as general-purpose hardware with limited ability to adapt to changing task requirements or environments. Modular robots, on the other hand, offer flexibility and can be easily customized to suit diverse needs.…
This paper explores the design strategies for hybrid pole- or trunk-climbing robots, focusing on methods to inform design decisions and assess metrics such as adaptability and performance. A wheeled-grasping hybrid robot with modular,…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
Many current robot designs prioritize efficiency and one-size-fits-all solutions, oftentimes overlooking personalization, adaptability, and sustainability. To explore alternatives, we conducted two co-design workshops with 23 participants,…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of 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…
Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is a prerequisite for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. This means that the robots need to be capable of generating behavior that aligns with human expectations and,…
Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…
Service robots are increasingly entering the home to provide domestic tasks for residents. However, when working in an open, dynamic, and unstructured home environment, service robots still face challenges such as low intelligence for task…
We enable efficient and effective coordination in unpredictable environments, i.e., in environments whose future evolution is unknown a priori and even adversarial. We are motivated by the future of autonomy that involves multiple robots…
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…
Truss robots are highly redundant parallel robotic systems that can be applied in a variety of scenarios. The variable topology truss (VTT) is a class of modular truss robots. As self-reconfigurable modular robots, a VTT is composed of many…
Dynamics modeling in outdoor and unstructured environments is difficult because different elements in the environment interact with the robot in ways that can be hard to predict. Leveraging multiple sensors to perceive maximal information…
Robotic Exploration has evolved rapidly in the past two decades as new and more complex techniques have been created to explore unknown regions efficiently. Exciting advancements in exploration, autonomous navigation, and sensor technology…
Heterogeneous multi-robot systems feature significant adaptability for complex environments. However, effective collaboration that fully exploits the robots' potential remains a core challenge. This paper proposes a decentralized…