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Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…
The objective of the system presented in this paper is to give users tactile feedback while walking in a virtual world through an anthropomorphic finger motion interface. We determined that the synchrony between the first person perspective…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Exploring planetary bodies with lower gravity, such as the moon and Mars, allows legged robots to utilize jumping as an efficient form of locomotion thus giving them a valuable advantage over traditional rovers for exploration. Motivated by…
Millions of people around the world need assistance with feeding. Robotic feeding systems offer the potential to enhance autonomy and quality of life for individuals with impairments and reduce caregiver workload. However, their widespread…
Robots in shared spaces often move in ways that are difficult for people to interpret, placing the burden on humans to adapt. High-DoF robots exhibit motion that people read as expressive, intentionally or not, making it important to…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Reliable perception is essential for robots that interact with the world. But sensors alone are often insufficient to provide this capability, and they are prone to errors due to various conditions in the environment. Furthermore, there is…
Legged robots constructed from soft materials are commonly claimed to demonstrate safer, more robust environmental interactions than their rigid counterparts. However, this motivating feature of soft robots requires more rigorous…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
Recently, humanoid robots have made significant advances in their ability to perform challenging tasks due to the deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL), however, the inherent complexity of humanoid robots, including the difficulty of…
Imitation can allow us to quickly gain an understanding of a new task. Through a demonstration, we can gain direct knowledge about which actions need to be performed and which goals they have. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
Controlling fine-grained forces during manipulation remains a core challenge in robotics. While robot policies learned from robot-collected data or simulation show promise, they struggle to generalize across the diverse range of real-world…
Designing robots capable of traversing uneven terrain and overcoming physical obstacles has been a longstanding challenge in the field of robotics. Walking robots show promise in this regard due to their agility, redundant DOFs and…
The emergence of robot-based body augmentation promises exciting innovations that will inform robotics, human-machine interaction, and wearable electronics. Even though augmentative devices like extra robotic arms and fingers in many ways…
This paper presents three feedback controllers that achieve an asymptotically stable, periodic, and fast walking gait for a 3D (spatial) bipedal robot consisting of a torso, two legs, and passive (unactuated) point feet. The contact between…
Robotic legs have bimodal operations: swing phases when the leg needs to move quickly in the air (high-speed, low-force) and stance phases when the leg bears the weight of the system (low-speed, high-force). Sizing a traditional…
Animating an avatar that reflects a user's action in the VR world enables natural interactions with the virtual environment. It has the potential to allow remote users to communicate and collaborate in a way as if they met in person.…
Evolutionary Robotics allows robots with limited sensors and processing to tackle complex tasks by means of sensory-motor coordination. In this paper we show the first application of the Behaviour Tree framework to a real robotic platform…