Related papers: Exploring environment exploitation for self-reconf…
The goal of machine learning is to provide solutions which are trained by data or by experience coming from the environment. Many training algorithms exist and some brilliant successes were achieved. But even in structured environments for…
To succeed in the real world, robots must cope with situations that differ from those seen during training. We study the problem of adapting on-the-fly to such novel scenarios during deployment, by drawing upon a diverse repertoire of…
Modular robotics enables the development of versatile and adaptive robotic systems with autonomous reconfiguration. This paper presents a modular robotic system in which each module has independent actuation, battery power, and control,…
Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…
When working alongside human collaborators in dynamic and unstructured environments, such as disaster recovery or military operation, fast field adaptation is necessary for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to perform its duties or learn…
Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Exploring and traversing extreme terrain with surface robots is difficult, but highly desirable for many applications, including exploration of planetary surfaces, search and rescue, among others. For these applications, to ensure the robot…
In this paper, we propose a leader-follower hierarchical strategy for two robots collaboratively transporting an object in a partially known environment with obstacles. Both robots sense the local surrounding environment and react to…
In this paper, we present an integrated solution to memory-efficient environment modeling by an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a laser range-finder. Majority of nowadays approaches to autonomous environment modeling, called…
Recent progress in legged locomotion has allowed highly dynamic and parkour-like behaviors for robots, similar to their biological counterparts. Yet, these methods mostly rely on egocentric (first-person) perception, limiting their…
Persistent monitoring using robot teams is of interest in fields such as security, environmental monitoring, and disaster recovery. Performing such monitoring in a fully on-line decentralised fashion has significant potential advantages for…
In this paper we consider the problem of coordinating robotic systems with different kinematics, sensing and vision capabilities to achieve certain mission goals. An approach that makes use of a heterogeneous team of agents has several…
A core aspect of human intelligence is the ability to learn new tasks quickly and switch between them flexibly. Here, we describe a modular continual reinforcement learning paradigm inspired by these abilities. We first introduce a visual…
The range of robot activities is expanding from industries with fixed environments to diverse and changing environments, such as nursing care support and daily life support. In particular, autonomous construction of robots that are…
For robots to become more versatile and expand their areas of application, their bodies need to be suitable for contact with the environment. When the human body comes into contact with the environment, it is possible for it to continue to…
Intrinsically motivated goal exploration processes enable agents to autonomously sample goals to explore efficiently complex environments with high-dimensional continuous actions. They have been applied successfully to real world robots to…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
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…
Complex environments and tasks pose a difficult problem for holistic end-to-end learning approaches. Decomposition of an environment into interacting controllable and non-controllable objects allows supervised learning for non-controllable…