Publications associées à Towards Optimal Control of Self-Organized Robotic Inspection Systems

Memento Mori: Reliable robustness in self-reconfigurable modular robots

Modular robotics link the reliability of a centralised system with the adaptivity of a decentralised system. It is difficult for a robot with a fixed shape to be able to perform many different types of tasks. As the task space grows, the number of functi ...

EPFL2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Robot Learning using Tensor Networks

Suhan Narayana Shetty

In various robotics applications, the selection of function approximation methods greatly influences the feasibility and computational efficiency of algorithms. Tensor Networks (TNs), also referred to as tensor decomposition techniques, present a versatile ...

EPFL2024

Small-scale robotic devices for medical interventions in the brain

Lorenzo Francesco John Noseda, Mahmut Selman Sakar

This article summarizes the recent advancements in the design, fabrication, and control of microrobotic devices for the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders. With a focus on diverse actuation methods, we discuss how advancements in materials science ...

2024

Educational Soft Underwater Robot with an Electromagnetic Actuation

Robert Marius Hennig

As demonstrated by the Soft Robotics Toolkit Platform, compliant robotics pose an exciting educational opportunity. Underwater robotics using soft undulating fins is an expansive research topic with applications such as exploration of underwater life or re ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Advanced control strategies to exploit the hydropower potential enhancing ancillary services provision to the power system

Francesco Gerini

The European Union's Green Deal aims for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. To reach this goal, a massive integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) into the power grid is necessary. As RES become a large part of the electricity genera ...

EPFL2024

Learning and optimization of anticipatory feedback controllers for robot manipulation

Hakan Girgin

Programming intelligent robots requires robust controllers that can achieve desired tasks while adapting to the changes in the task and the environment. In this thesis, we address the challenges in designing such adaptive and anticipatory feedback controll ...

EPFL2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Improving hand prosthesis control with advanced single-finger proportional decoding and robotic shared control

Vincent Alexandre Mendez

Myoelectric prostheses allow users to recover lost functionality by controlling a robotic device with their remaining muscle activity. Commercial devices usually use a two-recording-channel system placed on specific muscles to control a single degree of fr ...

EPFL2023

Control and Morphology Optimization of Passive Asymmetric Structures for Robotic Swimming

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Kamran Shakir, Andrea Vicari

Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example when creating bi ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Prescribing Cartesian Stiffness of Soft Robots by Co-Optimization of Shape and Segment-Level Stiffness

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Soft robots aim to revolutionize how robotic systems interact with the environment thanks to their inherent compliance. Some of these systems are even able to modulate their physical softness. However, simply equipping a robot with softness will not genera ...

MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC2023

Multi-robot task allocation for safe planning against stochastic hazard dynamics

Orcun Karaca, Maryam Kamgarpour

We address multi-robot safe mission planning in uncertain dynamic environments. This problem arises in several applications including safety-critical exploration, surveillance, and emergency rescue missions. Computation of a multi-robot optimal control pol ...

IEEE2023

Liquid Metal-Based Sensor Skin Enabling Haptic Perception of Softness

Stéphanie Lacour, Ivan Furfaro, Emilio Fernández Lavado, Haotian Chen

Haptic perception of softness is a unique feature of the human skin that relies on the concurrent measurements of the lateral deformation and compression of the skin during object manipulation. This is challenging to implement in robotics because of combin ...

2023

Enabling four-arm laparoscopic surgery by controlling two robotic assistants via haptic foot interfaces

Mohamed Bouri, Aude Billard, Walid Amanhoud, Jacob Hernandez Sanchez

Robotic surgery is a promising direction to improve surgeons and assistants’ daily life with respect to conventional surgery. In this work, we propose solo laparoscopic surgery in which two robotic arms, controlled via haptic foot interfaces, assist the ta ...

2023

A Provably Stable Iterative Learning Controller for Continuum Soft Robots

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Fully exploiting soft robots' capabilities requires devising strategies that can accurately control their movements with the limited amount of control sources available. This task is challenging for reasons including the hard-to-model dynamics, the system' ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Piecewise Affine Curvature model: a reduced-order model for soft robot-environment interaction beyond PCC

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella, Qinghua Guan

Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new exploration and m ...

IEEE2023

Development of a Robotic Microsurgeon for Embryonic Research

Ece Özelçi

Understanding how biological matter takes its shape is instrumental to biology, bioengineering, medicine, and bioinspired engineering. Gaining information on the principles of morphogenesis could enable clinicians to correct developmental abnormalities, ev ...

EPFL2023

Acoustic Levitation apparatus (Robotics Practicals)

Lorenzo Francesco John Noseda, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Amit Yedidia Dolev, Bora Yalcin

The following data contain the information and files, which are required to recreate and build the experimental setup that is described in the Laboratory manual. Further details can be found in the associated publication “A graduate laboratory experiment t ...

Zenodo2023

Exploration-based model learning with self-attention for risk-sensitive robot control

Sudong Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning for robot control offers the advantages of overcoming concerns on data collection and iterative processes for policy improvement in model-free methods. However, both methods use exploration strategy relying on heuristics ...

2023

The science of soft robot design: A review of motivations, methods and enabling technologies

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Novel technologies, fabrication methods, controllers and computational methods are rapidly advancing the capabilities of soft robotics. This is creating the need for design techniques and methodologies that are suited for the multi-disciplinary nature of s ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023