Related papers: Robots that redesign themselves through kinematic …
For the robots to achieve a desired behavior, we can program them directly, train them, or give them an innate driver that makes the robots themselves desire the targeted behavior. With the minimal surprise approach, we implant in our…
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…
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…
Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive,…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
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…
Robot manipulation is increasingly poised to interact with humans in co-shared workspaces. Despite increasingly robust manipulation and control algorithms, failure modes continue to exist whenever models do not capture the dynamics of the…
Robots' behavior and performance are determined both by hardware and software. The design process of robotic systems is a complex journey that involves multiple phases. Throughout this process, the aim is to tackle various criteria…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Robots generally have a structure that combines rotational joints and links in a serial fashion. On the other hand, various joint mechanisms are being utilized in practice, such as prismatic joints, closed links, and wire-driven systems.…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Humans are able to negotiate downstep behaviors -- both planned and unplanned -- with remarkable agility and ease. The goal of this paper is to systematically study the translation of this human behavior to bipedal walking robots, even if…
Domestic and service robots have the potential to transform industries such as health care and small-scale manufacturing, as well as the homes in which we live. However, due to the overwhelming variety of tasks these robots will be expected…
We study the problem of motion-planning for free-flying multi-link robots and develop a sampling-based algorithm that is specifically tailored for the task. Our work is based on the simple observation that the set of configurations for…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Replicating and surpassing the autonomy of natural organisms remains a long-standing goal in robotics. Yet most robotic systems have their structure, materials, and control designed separately, in sharp contrast to the co-evolution in…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
Which kind of complex behavior may arise from self-organizing principles? We investigate this question for the case of snake-like robots composed of passively coupled segments, with every segment containing two wheels actuated separately by…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…