Related papers: Walk the Robot: Exploring Soft Robotic Morphologic…
This paper presents a combined strategy for tracking a non-holonomic mobile robot which works under certain operating conditions for system parameters and disturbances. The strategy includes kinematic steering and velocity dynamics learning…
Hierarchically modular organization is a canonical network topology that is evolutionarily conserved in the nervous systems of animals. Within the network, neurons form directional connections defined by the growth of their axonal…
Flying insects are capable of vision-based navigation in cluttered environments, reliably avoiding obstacles through fast and agile maneuvers, while being very efficient in the processing of visual stimuli. Meanwhile, autonomous micro air…
Understanding cognitive flexibility and task-switching mechanisms in neural systems requires biologically plausible computational models. This tutorial presents a step-by-step approach to constructing a spiking neural network (SNN) that…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
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…
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) emulated on dedicated neuromorphic accelerators promise to offer energy-efficient signal processing. However, the neuromorphic advantage over traditional algorithms still remains to be demonstrated in…
Drones which can swarm and loiter in a certain area cost hundreds of dollars, but mosquitos can do the same and are essentially worthless. To control swarms of low-cost robots, researchers may end up spending countless hours brainstorming…
How dynamic interactions between nervous system regions in mammals performs online motor control remains an unsolved problem. In this paper we show that feedback control is a simple, yet powerful way to understand the neural dynamics of…
In motor neuroscience, artificial recurrent neural networks models often complement animal studies. However, most modeling efforts are limited to data-fitting, and the few that examine virtual embodied agents in a reinforcement learning…
Collaborative robots and space manipulators contain significant joint flexibility. It complicates the control design, compromises the control bandwidth, and limits the tracking accuracy. The imprecise knowledge of the flexible joint…
Neuromorphic engineering aims to incorporate the computational principles found in animal brains, into modern technological systems. Following this approach, in this work we propose a closed-loop neuromorphic control system for an…
Enabling robots to perform complex dynamic tasks such as picking up an object in one sweeping motion or pushing off a wall to quickly turn a corner is a challenging problem. The dynamic interactions implicit in these tasks are critical…
Voxel-based Soft Robots (VSRs) are a form of modular soft robots, composed of several deformable cubes, i.e., voxels. Each VSR is thus an ensemble of simple agents, namely the voxels, which must cooperate to give rise to the overall VSR…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
Soft growing robots, are a type of robots that are designed to move and adapt to their environment in a similar way to how plants grow and move with potential applications where they could be used to navigate through tight spaces, dangerous…
We propose a novel mechanism that propagates vibration through soft twisted beams, taking advantage of dynamically-coupled anisotropic stiffness to simplify the actuation of walking robots. Using dynamic simulation and experimental…
A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of links,…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…