Related papers: MorphoGuard: A Morphology-Based Whole-Body Interac…

Whole-body control (WBC) of humanoid robots has witnessed remarkable progress in skill versatility, enabling a wide range of applications such as locomotion, teleoperation, and motion tracking. Despite these achievements, existing WBC…

Humans and animals are capable of quickly learning new behaviours to solve new tasks. Yet, we often forget that they also rely on a highly specialized morphology that co-adapted with motor control throughout thousands of years. Although…

Whole-body manipulation (WBM) for humanoid robots presents a promising approach for executing embracing tasks involving bulky objects, where traditional grasping relying on end-effectors only remains limited in such scenarios due to…

Robotic performance emerges from the coupling of body and controller, yet it remains unclear when morphology-control co-design is necessary. We present a unified framework that embeds morphology and control parameters within a single neural…

Developing controllers that generalize across diverse robot morphologies remains a significant challenge in legged locomotion. Traditional approaches either create specialized controllers for each morphology or compromise performance for…

Dexterous in-hand manipulation is an essential skill of production and life. However, the highly stiff and mutable nature of contacts limits real-time contact detection and inference, degrading the performance of model-based methods.…

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…

Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…

A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…

In Evolutionary Robotics, evolutionary algorithms are used to co-optimize morphology and control. However, co-optimizing leads to different challenges: How do you optimize a controller for a body that often changes its number of inputs and…

This paper discusses developments for a multi-limb morphogenetic UAV, MorphoGear, that is capable of both aerial flight and ground locomotion. A hybrid path planning algorithm based on the A* strategy has been developed, enabling seamless…

We present the design and implementation of a taskable reactive mobile manipulation system. In contrary to related work, we treat the arm and base degrees of freedom as a holistic structure which greatly improves the speed and fluidity of…

Whereas naturally occurring swarms thrive when crowded, physical interactions in robotic swarms are either avoided or carefully controlled, thus limiting their operational density. Here we present a mechanical design rule that allows robots…

Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…

A motion-based control interface promises flexible robot operations in dangerous environments by combining user intuitions with the robot's motor capabilities. However, designing a motion interface for non-humanoid robots, such as…

We present a Morphology-Informed Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (MI-HGNN) for learning-based contact perception. The architecture and connectivity of the MI-HGNN are constructed from the robot morphology, in which nodes and edges are…

This paper proposes a novel control framework for agile and robust bipedal locomotion, addressing model discrepancies between full-body and reduced-order models. Specifically, assumptions such as constant centroidal inertia have introduced…

Research on mobile manipulation systems that physically interact with humans has expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the way to tasks which could not be performed using fixed-base manipulators. Within this context, developing suitable…

Collaborative robots can relief human operators from excessive efforts during payload lifting activities. Modelling the human partner allows the design of safe and efficient collaborative strategies. In this paper, we present a control…

Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…