Related papers: Controlling Robot Morphology from Incomplete Measu…
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…
Controlling a team of robots in a coordinated manner is challenging because centralized approaches (where all computation is performed on a central machine) scale poorly, and globally referenced external localization systems may not always…
Optimizing the morphologies and the controllers that adapt to various tasks is a critical issue in the field of robot design, aka. embodied intelligence. Previous works typically model it as a joint optimization problem and use search-based…
To autonomously collect soil in uncultivated terrain, robotic arms must distinguish between different amorphous materials and submerge themselves into the correct material. We develop a prototype that collects soil in heterogeneous terrain.…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…
The effectiveness of a robot manipulation to a large extent is determined by the speed of making this or that movement needed for carrying out the task. Accordingly to this the problem of optimal robot control is often subdivided into two…
In the field of robotic control, designing individual controllers for each robot leads to high computational costs. Universal control policies, applicable across diverse robot morphologies, promise to mitigate this challenge. Predominantly,…
Mobile robotic manipulation--the ability of robots to navigate spaces and interact with objects--is a core capability of physical AI. Foundation models have led to breakthroughs in their performance, but at a significant computational cost.…
Autonomous robots deployed in shared human environments, such as agricultural settings, require rigorous safety assurance to meet both functional reliability and regulatory compliance. These systems must operate in dynamic, unstructured…
Robot navigation methods allow mobile robots to operate in applications such as warehouses or hospitals. While the environment in which the robot operates imposes requirements on its navigation behavior, most existing methods do not allow…
Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…
In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of piecewise affine feedback controllers to address the problem of safe and robust controller design in robotics based on high-level controls specifications. The methodology is based on…
This work proposes a novel transformation termed the conformal navigation transformation to achieve collision-free navigation of a robot in a workspace populated with arbitrary polygonal obstacles. The properties of the conformal navigation…
Exploring and traversing extreme terrain with surface robots is difficult, but highly desirable for many applications, including exploration of planetary surfaces, search and rescue, among others. For these applications, to ensure the robot…
This paper presents a robot control algorithm suitable for safe reactive navigation tasks in cluttered environments. The proposed approach consists of transforming the robot workspace into the \emph{ball world}, an artificial representation…
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…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
Geometric mechanics provides valuable insights into how biological and robotic systems use changes in shape to move by mechanically interacting with their environment. In high-friction environments it provides that the entire interaction is…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…