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Emerging applications of robotics, and concerns about their impact, require the research community to put human-centric objectives front-and-center. To meet this challenge, we advocate an interdisciplinary approach, socially cognizant…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a…
Among the many anticipated roles for robots in the future is that of being a human teammate. Aside from all the technological hurdles that have to be overcome with respect to hardware and control to make robots fit to work with humans, the…
Legged robots have achieved impressive feats in dynamic locomotion in challenging unstructured terrain. However, in entertainment applications, the design and control of these robots face additional challenges in appealing to human…
When a human and a humanoid robot collaborate physically, ergonomics is a key factor to consider. Assuming a given humanoid robot, several control architectures exist nowadays to address ergonomic physical human-robot collaboration. This…
Assistive robotic systems have shown growing potential to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. As researchers explore the automation of various caregiving tasks, considerations for how the technology can still preserve…
We study the effects of injecting human-generated designs into the initial population of an evolutionary robotics experiment, where subsequent population of robots are optimised via a Genetic Algorithm and MAP-Elites. First, human…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…
The automatic design of embodied agents (e.g. robots) has existed for 31 years and is experiencing a renaissance of interest in the literature. To date however, the field has remained narrowly focused on two kinds of anatomically simple…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…
Optimizing the morphologies and the controllers that adapt to various tasks is a critical issue in the field of robot design, aka. embodied intelligence. Previous works typically model it as a joint optimization problem and use search-based…
Robotic systems that are intended to augment human capabilities commonly require the use of semi-autonomous control and artificial sensing, while at the same time aiming to empower the user to make decisions and take actions. This work…
Co-design optimization strategies usually rely on simplified robot models extracted from CAD. While these models are useful for optimizing geometrical and inertial parameters for robot control, they might overlook important details…
Motion imitation is a pivotal and effective approach for humanoid robots to achieve a more diverse range of complex and expressive movements, making their performances more human-like. However, the significant differences in kinematics and…
With momentum increasing in the use of social robots as long-term assistive and collaborative partners, humans developing social bonds with these artificial agents appears to be inevitable. In human-human dyads, social bonding plays a…
Robots are moving beyond industrial settings into creative, educational, and public environments where interaction is open-ended and improvisational. Yet much of human-AI-robot interaction remains framed around performance and efficiency,…
This paper addresses the topic of robustness under sensing noise, ambiguous instructions, and human-robot interaction. We take a radically different tack to the issue of reliable embodied AI: instead of focusing on formal verification…
Designing effective embodied multi-agent systems is critical for solving complex real-world tasks across domains. Due to the complexity of multi-agent embodied systems, existing methods fail to automatically generate safe and efficient…