Publications related to Robot swarms as an educational tool: The Thymio’s way

An Optimal Control Formulation of Tool Affordance Applied to Impact Tasks

Humans use tools to complete impact-aware tasks, such as hammering a nail or playing tennis. The postures adopted to use these tools can significantly influence the performance of these tasks, where the force or velocity of the hand holding a tool plays a ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

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

Development and clinical validation of computational imaging biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases

Veronica Lily Ravano

Neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory disorders often involve complex pathophysiological mechanisms that are â to this date â only partially understood. A more comprehensive understanding of those microstructural processes and their characterization ...

EPFL2024

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Christoph Heinrich Belke, 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

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Farshad Khadivar, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

Identifying important sensory feedback for learning locomotion skills

Auke Ijspeert, Guillaume Denis Antoine Bellegarda, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani

Robot motor skills can be acquired by deep reinforcement learning as neural networks to reflect state-action mapping. The selection of states has been demonstrated to be crucial for successful robot motor learning. However, because of the complexity of neu ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Computational Models of Mutual Understanding for Human-Robot Collaborative Learning

Utku Norman

There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...

EPFL2023

Implicit Distance Functions: Learning and Applications in Robotics

Mikhail Koptev

In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...

EPFL2023

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