Related papers: ControlIt! - A Software Framework for Whole-Body O…
Mobile manipulation is usually achieved by sequentially executing base and manipulator movements. This simplification, however, leads to a loss in efficiency and in some cases a reduction of workspace size. Even though different methods…
Robots can provide assistance to a human by moving objects to locations around the person's body. With a well chosen initial configuration, a robot can better reach locations important to an assistive task despite model error, pose…
In advanced manufacturing, strict safety guarantees are required to allow humans and robots to work together in a shared workspace. One of the challenges in this application field is the variety and unpredictability of human behavior,…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Task-space Passivity-Based Control (PBC) for manipulation has numerous appealing properties, including robustness to modeling error and safety for human-robot interaction. Existing methods perform poorly in singular configurations, however,…
Non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer an intuitive means for individuals with severe motor impairments to independently operate assistive robotic wheelchairs and navigate built environments.…
Recent advancements in constrained kinematic control make it an attractive strategy for controlling robots with arbitrary geometry in challenging tasks. Most current works assume that the robot kinematic model is precise enough for the task…
Despite recent advances in control, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning, developing a unified framework that can achieve agile, precise, and robust whole-body behaviors, particularly in long-horizon tasks, remains challenging.…
We present a shared control paradigm that improves a user's ability to operate complex, dynamic systems in potentially dangerous environments without a priori knowledge of the user's objective. In this paradigm, the role of the autonomous…
Automated vehicles and logistics robots must often position themselves in narrow environments with high precision in front of a specific target, such as a package or their charging station. Often, these docking scenarios are solved in two…
Catching flying objects with a cushioning process is a skill commonly performed by humans, yet it remains a significant challenge for robots. In this paper, we present a framework that combines optimization and learning to achieve compliant…
Dual-arm mobile manipulators can transport and manipulate large-size objects with simple end-effectors. To interact with dynamic environments with strict safety and compliance requirements, achieving whole-body motion planning online while…
Object-centric representation learning has recently been successfully applied to real-world datasets. This success can be attributed to pretrained non-object-centric foundation models, whose features serve as reconstruction targets for slot…
We propose a robust dynamic walking controller consisting of a dynamic locomotion planner, a reinforcement learning process for robustness, and a novel whole-body locomotion controller (WBLC). Previous approaches specify either the position…
Learning from real-world robot demonstrations holds promise for interacting with complex real-world environments. However, the complexity and variability of interaction dynamics often cause purely positional controllers to struggle with…
Humans' ability to smoothly switch between locomotion and manipulation is a remarkable feature of sensorimotor coordination. Leaning and replication of such human-like strategies can lead to the development of more sophisticated robots…
The last few years have seen the emergence of IoT processors: ultra-low power systems-on-chips (SoCs) combining lightweight and flexible micro-controller units (MCUs), often based on open-ISA RISC-V cores, with application-specific…
In this paper, we introduce the humanoid robot DRACO 3 by providing a high-level description of its design and control. This robot features proximal actuation and mechanical artifacts to provide a high range of hip, knee and ankle motion.…
Robotic solutions, in particular robotic arms, are becoming more frequently deployed for close collaboration with humans, for example in manufacturing or domestic care environments. These robotic arms require the user to control several…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…