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In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
Animals and robots exist in a physical world and must coordinate their bodies to achieve behavioral objectives. With recent developments in deep reinforcement learning, it is now possible for scientists and engineers to obtain sensorimotor…
In Human-Robot Collaboration, safety mechanisms such as Speed and Separation Monitoring and Power and Force Limitation dynamically adjust the robot's speed based on human proximity. While essential for risk reduction, these mechanisms…
This paper presents a hierarchical framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning that acquires motor skills for a variety of push recovery and balancing behaviors, i.e., ankle, hip, foot tilting, and stepping strategies. The policy is trained…
When faced with a novel scenario, it can be hard to succeed on the first attempt. In these challenging situations, it is important to know how to retry quickly and meaningfully. Retrying behavior can emerge naturally in robots trained on…
Real-time multi-agent collision-avoidance algorithms comprise a key enabling technology for the practical use of self-organising swarms of drones. This paper proposes a decentralised reciprocal collision-avoidance algorithm, which is based…
We treat the problem of autonomous acquisition of manipulation skills where problem-solving strategies are initially available only for a narrow range of situations. We propose to extend the range of solvable situations by autonomous…
Humanoid robots operating in unstructured environments must recover from unexpected disturbances-a capability that remains challenging for end-to-end control policies. We present RECOVERFORMER, a fully end-to-end humanoid recovery policy…
Autonomous exploration for mapping unknown large scale environments is a fundamental challenge in robotics, with efficiency in time, stability against map corruption and computational resources being crucial. This paper presents a novel…
Extending the abilities of service robots is important for expanding what they can achieve in everyday manipulation tasks. On the other hand, it is also essential to ensure them to determine what they can not achieve in certain cases due to…
A typical application of upper-limb exoskeleton robots is deployment in rehabilitation training, helping patients to regain manipulative abilities. However, as the patient is not always capable of following the robot, safety issues may…
Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work we present SAFER, an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that is able to improve safety by correcting the control…
In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…
Autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments should identify and report anomalies. Embodying proactive mitigation improves safety and operational continuity. This paper presents a multimodal anomaly detection and mitigation system…
Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…
We propose a novel angular velocity estimation method to increase the robustness of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithms against gyroscope saturations induced by aggressive motions. Field robotics expose robots to various…
An autonomous robot should be able to evaluate the affordances that are offered by a given situation. Here we address this problem by designing a system that can densely predict affordances given only a single 2D RGB image. This is achieved…
We propose a solution for sensor extrinsic self-calibration with very low time complexity, competitive accuracy and graceful handling of often-avoided corner cases: drift in calibration parameters and unobservable directions in the…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…