15 accepted papers
Accurate simulation of tendon-driven continuum robots (TDCRs) remains challenging due to their continuous deformation, complex tendon actuation, and strong nonlinearity. One valid approach is learning from real-world data. In this paper, we present a lightweight, low-cost 3D-printed TDCR hardware pl…
Robot description models are essential for simulation and control, yet their creation often requires significant manual effort. To streamline this modeling process, we introduce AutoURDF, an unsupervised approach for constructing description files for unseen robots from point cloud frames. Our metho…
A robot self-model is a task-agnostic representation of the robot’s physical morphology that can be used for motion planning tasks in the absence of a classical geometric kinematic model. In particular, when the latter is hard to engineer or the robot’s kinematics change unexpectedly, human-free sel…
Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains: for robots to fully capitalize on these advancements, they
Enlightened by the fast-running gait of mammals like cheetahs and wolves, we design and fabricate a single-actuated untethered compliant robot that is capable of galloping at a speed of 313 mm/s or 1.56 body length per second (BL/s), faster than most reported soft crawlers in mm/s and BL/s. An in-pl…
Robot grasping is subject to an inherent tradeoff: Grippers with a large span typically take a longer time to close, and fast grippers usually cover a small span. However, many practical applications of grippers require the ability to close a large distance rapidly. For example, grasping cloth typic…
This paper presents an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot’s soft body and soft legs were 3D printed with gyroid infill using…
We find that the way we choose to represent data labels can have a profound effect on the quality of trained models. For example, training an image classifier to regress audio labels rather than traditional categorical probabilities produces a more reliable classification. This result is surprising,…
Ability to generate intelligent and generalizable facial expressions is essential for building human-like social robots. At present, progress in this field is hindered by the fact that each facial expression needs to be programmed by humans. In order to adapt robot behavior in real time to different…
Interacting with bins and containers is a fundamental task in robotics, making state estimation of the objects inside the bin critical. While robots often use cameras for state estimation, the visual modality is not always ideal due to occlusions and poor illumination. We introduce The Boombox, a c…
In order to engage in complex social interaction, humans learn at a young age to infer what others see and cannot see from a different point-of-view, and learn to predict others’ plans and behaviors. These abilities have been mostly lacking in robots, sometimes making them appear awkward and sociall…
SATNet is an award-winning MAXSAT solver that can be used to infer logical rules and integrated as a differentiable layer in a deep neural network. It had been shown to solve Sudoku puzzles visually from examples of puzzle digit images, and was heralded as an impressive achievement towards the longs…
Hypernetworks are meta neural networks that generate weights for a main neural network in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Despite extensive applications ranging from multi-task learning to Bayesian deep learning, the problem of optimizing hypernetworks has not been studied to date. We observe t…
While most robotics simulation libraries are built for low-dimensional and intrinsically serial tasks, soft-body and multi-agent robotics have created a demand for simulation environments that can model many interacting bodies in parallel. Despite the increasing interest in these fields, no existing…
Recent advances in three-dimensional (3-D) printing are revolutionizing manufacturing, enabling the fabrication of structures with unprecedented complexity and functionality. Yet biological systems are able to fabricate systems with far greater complexity using a process that involves assembling and