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Natural plants are exemplars of adaptation through self-organisation and collective decision making. As such, they provide a rich source of inspiration for adaptive mechanisms in artificial systems. Plant growth - a structure development…

Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…

Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…

Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…

Soft machines display shape adaptation to external circumstances due to their intrinsic compliance. To achieve increasingly more responsive behaviors upon interactions without relying on centralized computation, embodying memory directly in…

Traditional top-down robotic design often lacks the adaptability needed to handle real-world complexities, prompting the need for more flexible approaches. Therefore, this study introduces a novel cellular plasticity model tailored for…

Sufficiently perceiving the environment is a critical factor in robot motion generation. Although the introduction of deep visual processing models have contributed in extending this ability, existing methods lack in the ability to actively…

In intelligent manufacturing, robots are asked to dynamically adapt their behaviours without reducing productivity. Human teaching, where an operator physically interacts with the robot to demonstrate a new task, is a promising strategy to…

The predictive functions that permit humans to infer their body state by sensorimotor integration are critical to perform safe interaction in complex environments. These functions are adaptive and robust to non-linear actuators and noisy…

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…

Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…

Natural systems integrate the work of many sub-units (cells) toward a large-scale unified goal (morphological and behavioral), which can counteract the effects of unexpected experiences, damage, or simply changes in tasks demands. In this…

Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…

Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…

Integrating Large Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains:…

The fields of soft and bio-inspired robotics promise to imbue synthetic systems with capabilities found in the natural world. However, many of these biological capabilities are yet to be realized. For example, vines in nature direct growth…

We introduce a robotic assembly system that streamlines the design-to-make workflow for going from a CAD model of a product assembly to a fully programmed and adaptive assembly process. Our system captures (in the CAD tool) the intent of…

Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…

Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…

Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…