MakeSense: Automated Sensor Design for Proprioceptive Soft Robots

Bodily aware soft robots: integration of proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors

Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is still not solved. In this paper we present a novel method to implement bodily awareness into soft robots by the integration of exteroceptive and proprioceptiv...

Soft Components for Soft Robots

Typical robot platforms comprise rigid links with fixed degrees-offreedom, solid blocks of transmission and actuator, and superficial positioning of sensors: they are often optimized for the given design criteria but are unable to execute instantaneous changes to the robot's initial mechanism design. The reallife incidences, however, require robots to face complex situations filled with unprogr...

Automated Design of Modular Field Robots

Invited Poster: makeSense: Easy Programming of Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks

WSNs are expected to play a critical role in the next computing revolution, as depicted in the visions of Cooperating Objects and the Internet of Things. However, designing and developing WSN software is currently very difficult. This may prevent WSNs from reaching large-scale adoption, especially in industry. The makeSense project aims at enabling an easier integration of WSNs in business proc...

Generative representations for the automated design of modular physical robots

The field of evolutionary robotics has demonstrated the ability to automatically design the morphology and controller of simple physical robots through synthetic evolutionary processes. However, it is not clear if variation-based search processes can attain the complexity of design necessary for practical engineering of robots. Here, we demonstrate an automatic design system that produces compl...