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A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a human operator is often not possible. Thus, much work has…
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…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
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…
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,…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
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…
The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…
When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…
The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…
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…
Self-Modeling is the process by which an agent, such as an animal or machine, learns to create a predictive model of its own dynamics. Once captured, this self-model can then allow the agent to plan and evaluate various potential behaviors…
The physical design of a robot and the policy that controls its motion are inherently coupled, and should be determined according to the task and environment. In an increasing number of applications, data-driven and learning-based…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
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…
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…
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…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…