Related papers: Co-design is powerful and not free
Robotic manipulation demands precise control over both contact forces and motion trajectories. While force control is essential for achieving compliant interaction and high-frequency adaptation, it is limited to operations in close…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
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…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Coupled human balancing tasks are investigated based on both pseudo-neural controllers characterized by time-delayed feedback with random gain and natural human balancing tasks. It is shown numerically that, compared to single balancing…
Industrial robots typically require very structured and predictable working environments, and explicit programming, in order to perform well. Therefore, expensive and time-consuming engineering work is a major obstruction when mediating…
Continuum robots, which often rely on interdisciplinary and multimedia collaborations, have been increasingly recognized for their potential to revolutionize the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) in varied applications due to their…
In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…
Constraint-based optimization is a cornerstone of robotics, enabling the design of controllers that reliably encode task and safety requirements such as collision avoidance or formation adherence. However, handcrafted constraints can fail…
Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support collaboration with human problem-holders increases.…
Mobile robots with complex morphology are essential for traversing rough terrains in Urban Search & Rescue missions (USAR). Since teleoperation of the complex morphology causes high cognitive load of the operator, the morphology is…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…
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…
Cross-robot policy learning -- training a single policy to perform well across multiple embodiments -- remains a central challenge in robot learning. Transformer-based policies, such as vision-language-action (VLA) models, are typically…
Complex engineered systems require coordinated design choices across heterogeneous components under multiple conflicting objectives and uncertain specifications. Monotone co-design provides a compositional framework for such problems by…
Co-design optimisation of autonomous systems has emerged as a powerful alternative to sequential approaches by jointly optimising physical design and control strategies. However, existing frameworks often neglect the robustness required for…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
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…
Morphological development is part of the way any human or animal learns. The learning processes starts with the morphology at birth and progresses through changing morphologies until adulthood is reached. Biologically, this seems to…
We present a scalable framework for cross-embodiment humanoid robot control by learning a shared latent representation that unifies motion across humans and diverse humanoid platforms, including single-arm, dual-arm, and legged humanoid…