Related papers: Robots that Evolve with Us: Modular Co-Design for …
Design-oriented HRI is increasingly interested in robots as long-term companions, yet many designs still assume a fixed form and a stable set of functions. We present an ongoing design research program that treats modularity as a designerly…
Robotics and automation have the potential to significantly improve quality of life for people with assistive needs and their carers. Adoption of such technologies at this point in time is far from widespread. This paper presents a novel…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Wearable technology has significantly improved the quality of life for older adults, and the emergence of on-body, movable robots presents new opportunities to further enhance well-being. Yet, the interaction design for these robots remains…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…
Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops…
The rapid advancement of robotics, spanning expanded capabilities, more intuitive interaction, and more integration into real-world workflows, is reshaping what it means for humans and robots to coexist. Beyond sharing physical space, this…
For a robot to be perfect and enter the everyday life of humans,like computers did, it needs to move from special-purpose robots to general-purpose. So, the idea of modularity is considered in this project.Thus, any type of task that falls…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
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…
The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…
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…
Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control,…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
A robot needs multiple interaction modes to robustly collaborate with a human in complicated industrial tasks. We develop a Coexistence-and-Cooperation (CoCo) human-robot collaboration system. Coexistence mode enables the robot to work with…
Modular robots can be reconfigured to create a variety of designs from a small set of components. But constructing a robot's hardware on its own is not enough -- each robot needs a controller. One could create controllers for some designs…
Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…
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…