Related papers: Walk the Robot: Exploring Soft Robotic Morphologic…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have captured apparent interest over the recent years, stemming from neuroscience and reaching the field of artificial intelligence. However, due to their nature SNNs remain far behind in achieving the…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Which kind of complex behavior may arise from self-organizing principles? We investigate this question for the case of snake-like robots composed of passively coupled segments, with every segment containing two wheels actuated separately by…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Recent advancements in legged robots using deep reinforcement learning have led to significant progress. Quadruped robots can perform complex tasks in challenging environments, while bipedal and humanoid robots have also achieved…
We examine the hypothesis, that short-term synaptic plasticity (STSP) may generate self-organized motor patterns. We simulated sphere-shaped autonomous robots, within the LPZRobots simulation package, containing three weights moving along…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Synthetic active collectives, composed of many nonliving individuals capable of cooperative changes in group shape and dynamics, hold promise for practical applications and for the elucidation of guiding principles of natural collectives.…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
Despite recent progress in training spiking neural networks (SNNs) for classification, their application to continuous motor control remains limited. Here, we demonstrate that fully spiking architectures can be trained end-to-end to control…
Learning weights in a spiking neural network with hidden neurons, using local, stable and online rules, to control non-linear body dynamics is an open problem. Here, we employ a supervised scheme, Feedback-based Online Local Learning Of…
This paper addresses the challenges of distributed formation control in multiple mobile robots, introducing a novel approach that enhances real-world practicability. We first introduce a distributed estimator using a variable structure and…
In this paper, we present a heterogeneous robot swarm system that can physically couple with each other to form functional structures and dynamically decouple to perform individual tasks. The connection between robots can be formed with a…
Intelligent biological systems are characterized by their embodiment in a complex environment and the intimate interplay between their nervous systems and the nonlinear mechanical properties of their bodies. This coordination, in which the…
Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem:…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Current robot architectures for modeling interaction behavior are not well suited to the dual task of sequencing discrete actions and incorporating information instantly. Additionally, for communication based on body motion, actions also…
Whereas naturally occurring swarms thrive when crowded, physical interactions in robotic swarms are either avoided or carefully controlled, thus limiting their operational density. Here we present a mechanical design rule that allows robots…