Josie Hughes, assistant professor at EPFL and head of the CREATE Lab, discusses AI-assisted robot design, soft robotics, and reconfigurable machines with Robot Talk host Claire Asher.
Hughes studies how a robot’s physical structure can help it work reliably in varied settings, from the Swiss Alps to cluttered spaces. Her lab combines body design with control and AI, drawing on how biological systems use their bodies to handle challenges.
Hughes’s ARIA Robot Dexterity work aims to turn a task description, image, or video into a gripper design, controller, and parts that can be fabricated. The team adapts language and vision models with robot design data, then tests candidate grippers using simulation and reinforcement learning. Hughes says they have fabricated an early gripper from text input and are expanding tests to more tasks.
A gripper built for one job, such as harvesting raspberries, may perform better with less weight and complexity than a general-purpose design. Optimizing across multiple tasks creates trade-offs in morphology, actuators, and performance. Hughes is also interested in robots that adapt their bodies online to handle changing tasks.
Hughes describes continuous soft arms inspired by elephant trunks and octopus tentacles, along with work on underwater swimmers and a tongue model for studying mastication and medical tools. A compliant rover developed by the team can change from a ball for rolling and surviving falls into a flatter form for driving and swimming. Reconfiguration can help a robot fit its body to a task, though the mechanisms add weight and complexity.
When a robot changes shape, it must estimate its current configuration before it can control its movements. Hughes describes a project studying the transition from tadpole to frog to understand how control changes as the body develops. She sees biological adaptation as a source of ideas for building more resilient robots.
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