Related papers: Active Constraints using Vector Field Inequalities…
Recent advances in Deep Machine Learning have shown promise in solving complex perception and control loops via methods such as reinforcement and imitation learning. However, guaranteeing safety for such learned deep policies has been a…
Uncertain dynamic obstacles, such as pedestrians or vehicles, pose a major challenge for optimal robot navigation with safety guarantees. Previous work on motion planning has followed two main strategies to provide a safe bound on an…
The dominant way to control a robot manipulator uses hand-crafted differential equations leveraging some form of inverse kinematics / dynamics. We propose a simple, versatile joint-level controller that dispenses with differential equations…
Accurate and real-time surgical instrument segmentation is important in the endoscopic vision of robot-assisted surgery, and significant challenges are posed by frequent instrument-tissue contacts and continuous change of observation…
Parameterizing finger rolling and finger-object contacts in a differentiable manner is important for formulating dexterous manipulation as a trajectory optimization problem. In contrast to previous methods which often assume simplified…
Path planning for multiple robots is well studied in the AI and robotics communities. For a given discretized environment, robots need to find collision-free paths to a set of specified goal locations. Robots can be fully anonymous,…
In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…
Object manipulation in robotics faces challenges due to diverse object shapes, sizes, and fragility. Gripper-based methods offer precision and low degrees of freedom (DOF) but the gripper limits the kind of objects to grasp. On the other…
This paper presents a new collision avoidance procedure for unmanned aerial vehicles in the presence of static and moving obstacles. The proposed procedure is based on a new form of local parametrized guidance vector fields, called…
The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…
Ground robots always get collision in that only if they get close to the obstacles, can they sense the danger and take actions, which is usually too late to avoid the crash, causing severe damage to the robots. To address this issue, we…
Vector field guided path following (VF-PF) algorithms are fundamental in robot navigation tasks, but may not deliver the desirable performance when robots encounter singular points where the vector field becomes zero. The existence of…
Many day-to-day activities require the dexterous manipulation of a redundant humanoid arm in complex 3D environments. However, position regulation of such robot arm systems becomes very difficult in presence of non-linear uncertainties in…
Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents…
Collaborative robots should ideally use low torque actuators for passive safety reasons. However, some applications require these collaborative robots to reach deep into confined spaces while assisting a human operator in physically…
In this work, we develop an approach for guiding robots to automatically localize and find the shapes of tumors and other stiff inclusions present in the anatomy. Our approach uses Gaussian processes to model the stiffness distribution and…
Tendon-driven snake-like arms have been used to create highly dexterous continuum robots so that they can bend around anatomical obstacles to access clinical targets. In this paper, we propose a design algorithm for developing…
A realistic human kinematic model that satisfies anatomical constraints is essential for human-robot interaction, biomechanics and robot-assisted rehabilitation. Modeling realistic joint constraints, however, is challenging as human arm…
Robotic surgery for minimally invasive surgery can reduce the surgeon's workload by autonomously guiding robotic forceps. Movement of the robot is restricted around a fixed insertion port. The robot often encounters angle limitations during…
Robotic surgery has been proven to offer clear advantages during surgical procedures, however, one of the major limitations is obtaining haptic feedback. Since it is often challenging to devise a hardware solution with accurate force…