Related papers: Parallel Simulation of Contact and Actuation for S…

In this paper we consider the problem of coordinating robotic systems with different kinematics, sensing and vision capabilities to achieve certain mission goals. An approach that makes use of a heterogeneous team of agents has several…

Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…

Robotic systems are increasingly expected to operate in human-centered, unstructured environments where safety, adaptability, and generalization are essential. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have been proposed as a language guided…

This paper presents a framework to enable a team of heterogeneous mobile robots to model and sense a multiscale system. We propose a coupled strategy, where robots of one type collect high-fidelity measurements at a slow time scale and…

Soft robots offer remarkable adaptability and safety advantages over rigid robots, but modeling their complex, nonlinear dynamics remains challenging. Strain-based models have recently emerged as a promising candidate to describe such…

This paper introduces a novel simulation framework for evaluating motion control in tethered multi-robot systems within dynamic marine environments. Specifically, it focuses on the coordinated operation of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle…

Robots need robust and flexible vision systems to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown…

Purpose of Review: This review provides an overview of the state of the art in bioinspired soft robotics with by examining advancements in actuation, functionality, modeling, and control. Recent Findings: Recent research into actuation…

As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…

Traditional approaches for active mapping focus on building geometric maps. For most real-world applications, however, actionable information is related to semantically meaningful objects in the environment. We propose an approach to the…

Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…

With the development of embodied artificial intelligence, robotic research has increasingly focused on complex tasks. Existing simulation platforms, however, are often limited to idealized environments, simple task scenarios and lack data…

Practical deployments of coordinated fleets of mobile robots in different environments have revealed the benefits of maintaining small distances between robots, especially as they move at higher speeds. However, this is counter-intuitive in…

In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…

The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…

Robotic tasks involving contact interactions pose significant challenges for trajectory optimization due to discontinuous dynamics. Conventional formulations typically assume deterministic contact events, which limit robustness and…

Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…

This research considers the task of evolving the physical structure of a robot to enhance its performance in various environments, which is a significant problem in the field of Evolutionary Robotics. Inspired by the fields of evolutionary…

Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…

Physics engines play an important role in robot planning and control; however, many real-world control problems involve complex contact dynamics that cannot be characterized analytically. Most physics engines therefore employ .…