Related papers: Robots that Evolve with Us: Modular Co-Design for …
Human computer interaction is shifting from screen-based systems to multimodal interfaces where artificial intelligence powered systems increasingly interpret user intent through speech, gesture, and gaze. Yet users rarely understand how…
How should a companion robot behave? In this research, we present a cognitive architecture based on a tailored personality model to investigate the impact of robotic personalities on the perception of companion robots. Drawing from existing…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
We present a participatory design method to design human-robot interactions with older adults and its application through a case study of designing an assistive robot for a senior living facility. The method, called Situated Participatory…
We present the design, characterization, and experimental results for a new modular robotic system for programmable self-assembly. The proposed system uses the Hybrid Cube Model (HCM), which integrates classical features from both…
We present a system enabling a modular robot to autonomously build structures in order to accomplish high-level tasks. Building structures allows the robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of tasks it can perform. This…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
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…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
Multiple levels of safety measures are required by multiple interaction modes which collaborative robots need to perform industrial tasks with human co-workers. We develop three independent modules to account for safety in different types…
As robots are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios, a key question is how to best transfer knowledge learned in one environment to another, where shifting constraints and human preferences render adaptation challenging. A central…
Human-robot interaction is emerging as an important paradigm for integrating persons with disabilities into the workplace. While these systems can enable individuals to work, their design is mostly personalized, hindering widespread use…
Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…
Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are a special type of social robots that focus on providing support through…
The paper presents a new formal way of modeling and designing reconfigurable robots, in which case the robots are allowed to reconfigure not only structurally but also functionally. We call such kind of robots "self-evolvable", which have…
It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…
Research in social robotics is commonly focused on designing robots that imitate human behavior. While this might increase a user's satisfaction and acceptance of robots at first glance, it does not automatically aid a non-expert user in…
As robots become more adaptable, responsive, and capable of interacting with humans, the design of effective human-robot collaboration becomes critical. Yet, this design process is typically led by monodisciplinary approaches, often…
Robots are often built from standardized assemblies, (e.g. arms, legs, or fingers), but each robot must be trained from scratch to control all the actuators of all the parts together. In this paper we demonstrate a new approach that takes a…