相关论文: Biological Organisms as End Effectors

This article describes an exemplary robot exercise which was conducted in a class for mechatronics students. The goal of this exercise was to engage students in scientific thinking and reasoning, activities which do not always play an…

Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…

Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…

We propose the framework of Series Elastic End Effectors in 6D (SEED), which combines a spatially compliant element with visuotactile sensing to grasp and manipulate tools in the wild. Our framework generalizes the benefits of series…

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…

Rodney Brooks (1991) put forth the idea that during an agent's interaction with its environment, representations of the world often stand in the way. Instead, using the world as its own best model, i.e. interacting with it directly without…

This paper explores the concept of reflexive actuation, examining how robots may leverage both internal and external stimuli to trigger changes in the motion, performance, or physical characteristics of the robot, such as its size, shape,…

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…

The manipulation of flexible objects such as cables, wires and fresh food items by robot hands forms a special challenge in robot grasp mechanics. This paper considers the steering of flexible linear objects in planar environments by two…

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…

Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…

Particle systems are physical systems of simple computational particles that can bond to neighboring particles and use these bonds to move from one spot to another (non-occupied) spot. These particle systems are supposed to be able to…

Transfer of objects between humans and robots is a critical capability for collaborative robots. Although there has been a recent surge of interest in human-robot handovers, most prior research focus on robot-to-human handovers. Further,…

This paper formally defines a robot system, including its sensing and actuation components, as a general, topological dynamical system. The focus is on determining general conditions under which various environments in which the robot can…

Inspired by a couple of simple organisms without eyes, neither ears. This paper presents a novel hybrid bionic robot, called "particle robot", which mix a macro-organism and a micro-organism in the same robot. On one hand, an interesting…

Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe other options exist -- not yet discovered -- on how to create life. To study the life "as it could be" is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life…

Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…

Many order fulfillment applications in logistics, such as packing, involve picking objects from unstructured piles before tightly arranging them in bins or shipping containers. Desirable robotic solutions in this space need to be low-cost,…

Current machine learning techniques proposed to automatically discover a robot kinematics usually rely on a priori information about the robot's structure, sensors properties or end-effector position. This paper proposes a method to…

What makes living systems flexible so that they can react quickly and adapt easily to changing environments? This question has not only engaged biologists for decades but is also of great interest to computer scientists and engineers who…