Related papers: Evolving the Complete Muscle: Efficient Morphology…

Modularisation, repetition, and symmetry are structural features shared by almost all biological neural networks. These features are very unlikely to be found by the means of structural evolution of artificial neural networks. This paper…

Morphological computing, the use of the physical design of a robot to ease the realization of a given task has been proven to be a relevant concept in the context of swarm robotics. Here we demonstrate both experimentally and numerically,…

In this paper, we introduce a model of evolution and learning in robots that co-optimizes a distribution of latent design vectors (genotypes) and a mixture of control experts (neural modules), which are gated by the latent coordinates of…

Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…

This paper presents a novel density control framework for multi-robot systems with spatial safety and energy sustainability guarantees. Stochastic robot motion is encoded through the Fokker-Planck Partial Differential Equation (PDE) at the…

In biomechanics and robotics, elasticity plays a crucial role in enhancing locomotion efficiency and stability. Traditional approaches in legged robots often employ series elastic actuators (SEA) with discrete rigid components, which, while…

We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the…

Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…

Design requirements for moving parts in mechanical assemblies are typically specified in terms of interactions with other parts. Some are purely kinematic (e.g., pairwise collision avoidance) while others depend on physics and material…

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…

Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…

Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…

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…

Learning motor control for muscle-driven musculoskeletal models is hindered by the computational cost of biomechanically accurate simulation and the scarcity of validated, open full-body models. Here we present MuscleMimic, an open-source…

Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…

A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of links,…

Robot co-design, jointly optimizing morphology and control policy, remains a longstanding challenge in the robotics community, where many promising robots have been developed. However, a key limitation lies in its tendency to converge to…

Brain-body co-optimization remains a challenging problem, despite increasing interest from the community in recent years. To understand and overcome the challenges, we propose exhaustively mapping a morphology-fitness landscape to study it.…

Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…

Developmental changes in body morphology profoundly shape locomotion in animals, yet artificial agents and robots are typically trained under static physical parameters. Inspired by ontogenetic scaling of muscle power in biology, we propose…