Related papers: Closed-Chain Manipulation of Large Objects by Mult…
The use of cables for aerial manipulation has shown to be a lightweight and versatile way to interact with objects. However, fastening objects using cables is still a challenge and human is required. In this work, we propose a novel way to…
In manipulation tasks, a robot interacts with movable object(s). The configuration space in manipulation planning is thus the Cartesian product of the configuration space of the robot with those of the movable objects. It is the complex…
When modeling complex robot systems such as branched robots, whose kinematic structures are a tree, current techniques often require modeling the whole structure from scratch, even when partial models for the branches are available. This…
Stable dynamical systems are a flexible tool to plan robotic motions in real-time. In the robotic literature, dynamical system motions are typically planned without considering possible limitations in the robot's workspace. This work…
Humans coordinate the abundant degrees of freedom (DoFs) of hands to dexterously perform tasks in everyday life. We imitate human strategies to advance the dexterity of multi-DoF robotic hands. Specifically, we enable a robot hand to grasp…
Incorporating a robotic manipulator into a wheel-legged robot enhances its agility and expands its potential for practical applications. However, the presence of potential instability and uncertainties presents additional challenges for…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in human environments. As such, we'd like our robots to reason about how multiple objects relate to one another and how those relations may change as the robot interacts with the world. To this end, we…
We consider the following variant of the two dimensional gathering problem for swarms of robots: Given a swarm of $n$ indistinguishable, point shaped robots on a two dimensional grid. Initially, the robots form a closed chain on the grid…
In this paper, we study movements of simple polygonal chains in 3D. We say that an open, simple polygonal chain can be straightened if it can be continuously reconfigured to a straight sequence of segments in such a manner that both the…
This paper presents a robust control scheme for flexible link robotic manipulators, which is based on considering the flexible mechanical structure as a system with slow (rigid) and fast (flexible) modes that can be controlled separately.…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
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…
Mixed Reality (MR) is constantly evolving to inspire new patterns of robot manipulation for more advanced Human- Robot Interaction under the 4th Industrial Revolution Paradigm. Consider that Mixed Reality aims to connect physical and…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Shape change enables new capabilities for robots. One class of robots capable of dramatic shape change is soft growing "vine" robots. These robots usually feature global actuation methods for bending that limit them to simple,…
In this letter, we propose a whole-body control strategy for humanoid robots in multi-contact settings that enables switching between fixed and sliding contacts under active balance. We compute, in real-time, a safe center-of-mass position…
We consider the problem of connected coordinated motion planning for a large collective of simple, identical robots: From a given start grid configuration of robots, we need to reach a desired target configuration via a sequence of…
Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…
Living organisms interact with their surroundings in a closed-loop fashion, where sensory inputs dictate the initiation and termination of behaviours. Even simple animals are able to develop and execute complex plans, which has not yet been…
In this paper, we present a heterogeneous robot swarm system that can physically couple with each other to form functional structures and dynamically decouple to perform individual tasks. The connection between robots can be formed with a…