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Every robot built to date was predesigned by an external process, prior to deployment. Here we show a robot that actively participates in its own design during its lifetime. Starting from a randomly assembled body, and using only…
Materials that respond to external stimuli by expanding or contracting provide a transduction route that integrates sensing and actuation powered directly by the stimuli. This motivates us to build colloidal scale robots using these…
The technological transition from soft machines to soft robots necessarily passes through the integration of soft electronics and sensors. This allows for the establishment of feedback control systems while preserving the softness of the…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Autonomous systems face the intricate challenge of navigating unpredictable environments and interacting with external objects. The successful integration of robotic agents into real-world situations hinges on their perception capabilities,…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
This review explores biologically inspired learning as a model for intelligent robot control and sensing technology on the basis of specific examples. Hebbian synaptic learning is discussed as a functionally relevant model for machine…
Humans in contrast to robots are excellent in performing fine manipulation tasks owing to their remarkable dexterity and sensorimotor organization. Enabling robots to acquire such capabilities, necessitates a framework that not only…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
Over the past decades, we have witnessed a rapid emergence of soft and reconfigurable robots thanks to their capability to interact safely with humans and adapt to complex environments. However, their softness makes accurate control very…
Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…
Our ability to produce human-scale bio-manufactured organs is critically limited by the need for vascularization and perfusion. For tissues of variable size and shape, including arbitrarily complex geometries, designing and printing…
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…
Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…
We present a self-supervised sensorimotor pre-training approach for robotics. Our model, called RPT, is a Transformer that operates on sequences of sensorimotor tokens. Given a sequence of camera images, proprioceptive robot states, and…
Softening and onboarding computers and controllers is one of the final frontiers in soft robotics towards their robustness and intelligence for everyday use. In this regard, embodying soft and physical computing presents exciting potential.…