Related papers: Functionalization of Situated Robots via Vapour

The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…

Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…

Quadruped robots are currently a widespread platform for robotics research, thanks to powerful Reinforcement Learning controllers and the availability of cheap and robust commercial platforms. However, to broaden the adoption of the…

Flow-matching-based policies have recently emerged as a promising approach for learning-based robot manipulation, offering significant acceleration in action sampling compared to diffusion-based policies. However, conventional flow-matching…

Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…

As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…

Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…

This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…

Motion planning is a crucial aspect of robot autonomy as it involves identifying a feasible motion path to a destination while taking into consideration various constraints, such as input, safety, and performance constraints, without…

Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…

We investigate the problem of multi-robot coordinated planning in environments where the robots may have to operate in close proximity to each other. We seek computationally efficient planners that ensure safe paths and adherence to…

Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…

We present situated live programming for human-robot collaboration, an approach that enables users with limited programming experience to program collaborative applications for human-robot interaction. Allowing end users, such as shop floor…

In this paper, we introduce a method to deal with the problem of robot local path planning among pushable objects -- an open problem in robotics. In particular, we achieve that by training multiple agents simultaneously in a physics-based…

We present VAPOR, a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in unstructured, densely vegetated outdoor environments using offline Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our method trains a novel RL policy using an actor-critic network and…

Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…

Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…

Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and…

Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…

In this paper, we present a heterogeneous robot swarm system that can physically couple with each other to form functional structures and dynamically decouple to perform individual tasks. The connection between robots can be formed with a…