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Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
We present parametric trajectory optimization, a method for simultaneously computing physical parameters, actuation requirements, and robot motions for more efficient robot designs. In this scheme, robot dimensions, masses, and other…
Humanoid robots represent a central frontier in embodied intelligence, as their anthropomorphic form enables natural deployment in humans' workspace. Brain-body co-design for humanoids presents a promising approach to realizing this…
Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…
We successfully evolved a neural network controller that produces dynamic walking in a simulated bipedal robot with compliant actuators, a difficult control problem. The evolutionary evaluation uses a detailed software simulation of a…
Muscle-actuated organisms are capable of learning an unparalleled diversity of dexterous movements despite their vast amount of muscles. Reinforcement learning (RL) on large musculoskeletal models, however, has not been able to show similar…
Humanoid robots hold great potential to perform various human-level skills, involving unified locomotion and manipulation in real-world settings. Driven by advances in machine learning and the strength of existing model-based approaches,…
Industrial human-robot collaboration requires motion planning that is collision-free, responsive, and ergonomically safe to reduce fatigue and musculoskeletal risk. We propose the Configuration Space Ergonomic Field (CSEF), a continuous and…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Loco-manipulation is a fundamental challenge for humanoid robots to achieve versatile interactions in human environments. Although recent studies have made significant progress in humanoid whole-body control, loco-manipulation remains…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
Whole-body control (WBC) has demonstrated significant advantages in complex interactive movements of high-dimensional robotic systems. However, when a robot is required to handle dynamic multi-contact combinations along a single kinematic…
Large-scale multimodal contrastive learning has recently achieved impressive success in learning rich and transferable representations, yet it remains fundamentally limited by the uniform treatment of feature dimensions and the neglect of…
This paper presents a novel and scalable screw-theoretic multibody synthesis framework for PDE-based dynamic modeling of serial robotic manipulators with an arbitrary number of flexible links in three-dimensional space. The proposed…
Reconstructing biomechanically realistic 3D human motion - recovering both kinematics (motion) and kinetics (forces) - is a critical challenge. While marker-based systems are lab-bound and slow, popular monocular methods use oversimplified,…
Robots exhibit a rich variety of symmetries arising from their mechanical structure and the properties of their tasks. Although many robotics problems exhibit several symmetries simultaneously, existing approaches typically treat them in…
In this paper, we present a real-time whole-body planner for collision-free legged mobile manipulation. We enforce both self-collision and environment-collision avoidance as soft constraints within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme…
Bipedal walking is one of the most important hallmarks of human that robots have been trying to mimic for many decades. Although previous control methodologies have achieved robot walking on some terrains, there is a need for a framework…
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…