5 accepted papers
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have broad applications including disaster response, transportation, photography, and mapping. A significant bottleneck in the development of UAVs is the limited availability of automatic tools for task-specific co-design of a UAV's shape and controller. The developme…
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are spe-cialized robots that are commonly used for seafloor surveying and ocean water sampling. Computational design approaches have emerged to reduce the effort required to design both individual AUVs as well as fleets. As the number and scale of underwater mis…
We present methods for co-designing rigid robots over control and morphology (including discrete topology) over multiple objectives. Previous work has addressed problems in single-objective robot co-design or multi-objective control. However, the joint multi-objective co-design problem is extremely…
Soft robots have continuum solid bodies that can deform in an infinite number of ways. Controlling soft robots is very challenging as there are no closed form solutions. We present a learning-in-the-loop co-optimization algorithm in which a latent state representation is learned as the robot figure…
Robots must cost less and be force-controlled to enable widespread, safe deployment in unconstrained human environments. We propose Quasi-Direct Drive actuation as a capable paradigm for robotic force-controlled manipulation in human environments at low-cost. Our prototype - Blue - is a human scale…