Related papers: Embracing Evolution: A Call for Body-Control Co-De…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
Humanoid robots hold great potential to perform various human-level skills, involving unified locomotion and manipulation in real-world settings. Driven by advances in machine learning and the strength of existing model-based approaches,…
Robots are used in more and more complex environments, and are expected to be able to adapt to changes and unknown situations. The easiest and quickest way to adapt is to change the control system of the robot, but for increasingly complex…
As robots increasingly become part of shared human spaces, their movements must transcend basic functionality by incorporating expressive qualities to enhance engagement and communication. This paper introduces a movement-centered design…
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…
With continual advancements in technology, efforts to develop robots simulating human behavior have intensified. Cognitive robotics, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), has proven effective in surveying and research analysis.…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…
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…
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…
The reasoning capabilities of embodied agents introduce a critical, under-explored inferential privacy challenge, where the risk of an agent generate sensitive conclusions from ambient data. This capability creates a fundamental tension…
In this paper, we introduce a model of evolution and learning in robots that co-optimizes a distribution of latent design vectors (genotypes) and a mixture of control experts (neural modules), which are gated by the latent coordinates of…
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…
Shared autonomy integrates user input with robot autonomy in order to control a robot and help the user to complete a task. Our work aims to improve the performance of such a human-robot team: the robot tries to guide the human towards an…
The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, and interaction.…
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…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
A human-shaped robotic hand offers unparalleled versatility and fine motor skills, enabling it to perform a broad spectrum of tasks with precision, power and robustness. Across the paleontological record and animal kingdom we see a wide…