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The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
Demonstrating acrobatic behavior of a humanoid robot such as flips and spinning jumps requires systematic approaches across hardware design, motion planning, and control. In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot design, an…
Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires planners to reason jointly about free-space motion and sustained, frictional contact with the environment. Existing (local) planning and simulation frameworks typically separate…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
We present a multi-contact walking pattern generator based on preview-control of the 3D acceleration of the center of mass (COM). A key point in the design of our algorithm is the calculation of contact-stability constraints. Thanks to a…
Feedback motion planning over cell decompositions provides a robust method for generating collision-free robot motion with formal guarantees. However, existing algorithms often produce paths with unnecessary bending, leading to slower…
Legged manipulators, such as quadrupeds equipped with robotic arms, require motion planning techniques that account for their complex kinematic constraints in order to perform manipulation tasks both safely and effectively. However,…
Glovebox decommissioning tasks usually require manipulating relatively heavy objects in a highly constrained environment. Thus, contact with the surroundings becomes inevitable. In order to allow the robot to interact with the environment…
The physical design of a robot and the policy that controls its motion are inherently coupled, and should be determined according to the task and environment. In an increasing number of applications, data-driven and learning-based…
Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…
This paper combines the fast Zero-Moment-Point (ZMP) approaches that work well in practice with the broader range of capabilities of a Trajectory Optimization formulation, by optimizing over body motion, footholds and Center of Pressure…
We present DisCo, a distributed algorithm for contact-rich, multi-robot tasks. DisCo is a distributed contact-implicit trajectory optimization algorithm, which allows a group of robots to optimize a time sequence of forces to objects and to…
The paper focuses on collision-inclusive motion planning for impact-resilient mobile robots. We propose a new deformation recovery and replanning strategy to handle collisions that may occur at run-time. Contrary to collision avoidance…
Soft robots were introduced in large part to enable safe, adaptive interaction with the environment, and this interaction relies fundamentally on contact. However, modeling and planning contact-rich interactions for soft robots remain…
Coordination of movement and configuration in robotic swarms is a challenging endeavor. Deciding when and where each individual robot must move is a computationally complex problem. The challenge is further exacerbated by difficulties…
Practical use of robotic manipulators made from soft materials requires generating and executing complex motions. We present the first approach for generating trajectories of a thermally-actuated soft robotic manipulator. Based on…
Legged robots are able to navigate complex terrains by continuously interacting with the environment through careful selection of contact sequences and timings. However, the combinatorial nature behind contact planning hinders the…
The problem of distributed formation control of nonholonomic mobile robots is addressed in this paper, in which the robots are designed to track a formation. Collision avoidance among agents is guaranteed using a control law based on a…
Optimization fabrics are a geometric approach to real-time local motion generation, where motions are designed by the composition of several differential equations that exhibit a desired motion behavior. We generalize this framework to…