Related papers: Learning Data-Efficient Rigid-Body Contact Models:…

The empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in the setting of contact-rich manipulation leaves much to be understood from a model-based perspective, where the key difficulties are often attributed to (i) the explosion of contact…

Data-driven model reduction methods provide a nonintrusive way of constructing computationally efficient surrogates of high-fidelity models for real-time control of soft robots. This work leverages the Lagrangian nature of the model…

Crowd movement simulation is crucial for pedestrian safety management and facility design. Data-driven models offer the potential to improve realism and predictive accuracy, but most are developed for a single scenario, limiting their…

Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…

The dominant paradigm for end-to-end robot learning focuses on optimizing task-specific objectives that solve a single robotic problem such as picking up an object or reaching a target position. However, recent work on high-capacity models…

Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…

We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact region is a planar non-convex contact patch. Such methods are useful in planning and…

Traditional dynamic models of continuum robots are in general computationally expensive and not suitable for real-time control. Recent approaches using learning-based methods to approximate the dynamic model of continuum robots for control…

The study of motion in animals and robots has been aided by insights from geometric mechanics. In friction dominated systems, a mechanical "connection" can provide a high fidelity mechanical model. The connection is a co-vector (Lie…

Model-reference adaptive systems refer to a consortium of techniques that guide plants to track desired reference trajectories. Approaches based on theories like Lyapunov, sliding surfaces, and backstepping are typically employed to advise…

Enabling humanoid robots to exploit physical contact, rather than simply avoid collisions, is crucial for autonomy in unstructured environments. Traditional optimization-based planners struggle with contact complexity, while on-policy…

Models play an essential role in the design process of cyber-physical systems. They form the basis for simulation and analysis and help in identifying design problems as early as possible. However, the construction of models that comprise…

Control techniques like MPC can realize contact-rich manipulation which exploits dynamic information, maintaining friction limits and safety constraints. However, contact geometry and dynamics are required to be known. This information is…

Animals and robots exist in a physical world and must coordinate their bodies to achieve behavioral objectives. With recent developments in deep reinforcement learning, it is now possible for scientists and engineers to obtain sensorimotor…

In the Mixup training paradigm, a model is trained using convex combinations of data points and their associated labels. Despite seeing very few true data points during training, models trained using Mixup seem to still minimize the…

Accurate post-impact velocity predictions are essential in developing impact-aware manipulation strategies for robots, where contacts are intentionally established at non-zero speed mimicking human manipulation abilities in dynamic grasping…

Joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data are commonly used in longitudinal studies to forecast disease trajectories over time. While there are many advantages to joint modeling, the standard forms suffer from limitations that…

The hybrid nature of multi-contact robotic systems, due to making and breaking contact with the environment, creates significant challenges for high-quality control. Existing model-based methods typically rely on either good prior knowledge…

Applications of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotics are often limited by high data demand. On the other hand, approximate models are readily available in many robotics scenarios, making model-based approaches like planning a…

High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…