Related papers: EvoGymCM: Harnessing Continuous Material Stiffness…
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…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
As electric vehicle (EV) numbers rise, concerns about the capacity of current charging and power grid infrastructure grow, necessitating the development of smart charging solutions. While many smart charging simulators have been developed…
This paper discusses the utility of using simple stiffness and vibrations models, based on the Jacobian matrix of a manipulator and only the rigidity of the actuators, whenever its geometry is optimised. In many works, these simplified…
This paper describes a 2D and 3D simulation engine that quantitatively models the statics, dynamics, and non-linear deformation of heterogeneous soft bodies in a computationally efficient manner. There is a large body of work simulating…
Garment refitting, the task of adapting a garment from a source to a target avatar, must preserve the original design features and fine-scale wrinkles, a challenge exacerbated by significant shape variations and varying poses without…
We introduce a novel co-design method for autonomous moving agents' shape attributes and locomotion by combining deep reinforcement learning and evolution with user control. Our main inspiration comes from evolution, which has led to wide…
Loco-manipulation, physical interaction of various objects that is concurrently coordinated with locomotion, remains a major challenge for legged robots due to the need for both precise end-effector control and robustness to unmodeled…
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…
Practical applications of mechanical metamaterials often involve solving inverse problems where the objective is to find the (multiple) microarchitectures that give rise to a given set of properties. The limited resolution of additive…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
Shape-morphing metamaterials enable adaptive structures capable of complex functional deformations, with applications ranging from reconfigurable structures and soft robotics to medical devices. However, their design remains challenging due…
We present ContainerGym, a benchmark for reinforcement learning inspired by a real-world industrial resource allocation task. The proposed benchmark encodes a range of challenges commonly encountered in real-world sequential decision making…
The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…
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…
There is a growing mechanics literature concerning the macroscopic properties of mechanism-based mechanical metamaterials. This amounts mathematically to a homogenization problem involving nonlinear elasticity. A key goal is to identify the…
Video generative models (VGMs) pretrained on large-scale internet data can produce temporally coherent rollout videos that capture rich object dynamics, offering a compelling foundation for zero-shot robotic manipulation. However, VGMs…
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…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…