Related papers: koboshi: A Base That Animates Everyday Objects
Swarm User Interfaces allow dynamic arrangement of user environments through the use of multiple mobile robots, but their operational range is typically confined to a single plane due to constraints imposed by their two-wheel propulsion…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Assistive robot arms have the potential to help disabled or elderly adults eat everyday meals without relying on a caregiver. To provide meaningful assistance, these robots must reach for food items, pick them up, and then carry them to the…
This paper presents the design of a new soft-rigid robotic platform, "GeoGami". We leverage origami surface capabilities to achieve shape contraction and to support locomotion with underactuated forms. A key challenge is that origami…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
Scaling up robot learning will likely require human data containing rich and long-horizon interactions in the wild. Existing approaches for collecting such data trade off portability, robustness to occlusion, and global consistency. We…
Age-related loss of mobility and increased risk of falling remain important obstacles toward facilitating aging-in-place. Many elderly people lack the coordination and strength necessary to perform common movements around their home, such…
This paper describes the Pogobot, an open-source platform specifically designed for research at the interface of swarm robotics and active matter. Pogobot features vibration-based or wheel-based locomotion, fast infrared communication, and…
Intelligence lies not only in the brain (decision-making processes) but in the body (physical morphology). The morphology of robots can significantly influence how they interact with the physical world, crucial for manipulating objects in…
Various musculoskeletal humanoids have been developed so far. While these humanoids have the advantage of their flexible and redundant bodies that mimic the human body, they are still far from being applied to real-world tasks. One of the…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Systems consisting of spheres rolling on elastic membranes have been used to introduce a core conceptual idea of General Relativity (GR): how curvature guides the movement of matter. However, such schemes cannot accurately represent…
Robots operating in domestic environments generally need to interact with articulated objects, such as doors, cabinets, dishwashers or fridges. In this work, we present a novel, probabilistic framework for modeling articulated objects as…
Although robots with flexible bodies are superior in terms of the contact and adaptability, it is difficult to control them precisely. On the other hand, human beings make use of the surrounding environments to stabilize their bodies and…
A mobility mechanism for robots to be used in tight spaces shared with people requires it to have a small footprint, to move omnidirectionally, as well as to be highly maneuverable. However, currently there exist few such mobility…
Active matter systems use their internal or ambient source of energy and dissipate them at the scale of individual constituent particles to generate motion. Direct measurement of the energy influx for individual particles has not been…
This paper presents a sim-to-real approach that enables legged robots to dynamically manipulate large and heavy objects with whole-body dexterity. Our key insight is that by performing test-time steering of a pre-trained whole-body control…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…