Related papers: A Design Co-Pilot for Task-Tailored Manipulators
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
Traditional aerial vehicles have limitations in their capabilities due to actuator constraints, such as motor saturation. The hardware components and their arrangement are designed to satisfy specific requirements and are difficult to…
As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…
Modular robots have the potential to revolutionize automation, as one can optimize their composition for any given task. However, finding optimal compositions is non-trivial. In addition, different compositions require different base…
Designing physical artifacts that serve a purpose - such as tools and other functional structures - is central to engineering as well as everyday human behavior. Though automating design has tremendous promise, general-purpose methods do…
In real-world industrial environments, modern robots often rely on human operators for crucial decision-making and mission synthesis from individual tasks. Effective and safe collaboration between humans and robots requires systems that can…
In this paper, we investigate the adaptive control problem for robot manipulators with both the uncertain kinematics and dynamics. We propose two adaptive control schemes to realize the objective of task-space trajectory tracking…
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…
In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…
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…
Humans and animals are capable of quickly learning new behaviours to solve new tasks. Yet, we often forget that they also rely on a highly specialized morphology that co-adapted with motor control throughout thousands of years. Although…
The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot…
The ongoing deep learning revolution has allowed computers to outclass humans in various games and perceive features imperceptible to humans during classification tasks. Current machine learning techniques have clearly distinguished…
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…
Designing multi-agent robotic systems requires reasoning across tightly coupled decisions spanning heterogeneous domains, including robot design, fleet composition, and planning. Much effort has been devoted to isolated improvements in…
Traditional robotic manipulator design methods require extensive, time-consuming, and manual trial and error to produce a viable design. During this process, engineers often spend their time redesigning or reshaping components as they…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
The range of robot activities is expanding from industries with fixed environments to diverse and changing environments, such as nursing care support and daily life support. In particular, autonomous construction of robots that are…
Modular manipulators composed of pre-manufactured and interchangeable modules offer high adaptability across diverse tasks. However, their deployment requires generating feasible motions while jointly optimizing morphology and mounted pose…
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…