Related papers: True Rigidity: Interpenetration-free Multi-Body Si…
Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…
The computational modeling of many engineering problems using the Finite Element method involves the modeling of two or more bodies that meet through an interface. The interface can be physical, as in multi-physics and contact problems, or…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
Intrinsically elastic robots surpass their rigid counterparts in a range of different characteristics. By temporarily storing potential energy and subsequently converting it to kinetic energy, elastic robots are capable of highly dynamic…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
A realistic simulation environment is an essential tool in every roboticist's toolkit, with uses ranging from planning and control to training policies with reinforcement learning. Despite the centrality of simulation in modern robotics,…
Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…
A classical approach to the multibody systems (MBS) modeling is to use absolute coordinates, i.e., a set of (possibly redundant) coordinates that describe the absolute position and orientation of the individual bodies with respect to an…
Generating stable walking gaits that yield natural locomotion when executed on robotic-assistive devices is a challenging task that often requires hand-tuning by domain experts. This paper presents an alternative methodology, where we…
Dynamic simulation of elastic bodies is a longstanding task in engineering and computer graphics. In graphics, numerical integrators like implicit Euler and BDF2 are preferred due to their stability at large time steps, but they tend to…
Optimization-based methods are widely used for computing fast, diverse solutions for complex tasks such as collision-free movement or planning in the presence of contacts. However, most of these methods require enforcing non-penetration…
In this paper, we explore an approach to actively plan and excite contact modes in differentiable simulators as a means to tighten the sim-to-real gap. We propose an optimal experimental design approach derived from information-theoretic…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
A key challenge in contact-rich dexterous manipulation is the need to jointly reason over geometry, kinematic constraints, and intricate, nonsmooth contact dynamics. End-to-end visuomotor policies bypass this structure, but often require…
This article describes an absolutely stable, first-order constraint solverfor multi-rigid body systems that calculates (predicts) constraint forces for typical bilateral and unilateral constraints, contact constraints with friction, and…
This paper is concerned with the development and testing of advanced time-stepping methods suited for the integration of time-accurate, real-world applications of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The performance of several time…
Robotics demands simulation that can reason about the diversity of real-world physical interactions, from rigid to deformable objects and fluids. Current simulators address this by stitching together multiple subsolvers for different…