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To operate reactively in uncertain environments, robots need to be able to quickly estimate the risk that they will collide with their environment. This ability is important for both planning (to ensure that plans maintain acceptable levels…
Deep Venous Thrombosis (DVT) is a common vascular disease with blood clots inside deep veins, which may block blood flow or even cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. A typical exam for DVT using ultrasound (US) imaging is by…
Performing swift and agile maneuvers is essential for the safe operation of autonomous mobile robots. Moreover, the presence of time-delay restricts the response time of the system and hinders the safety performance. Thus, this paper…
In this paper, we focus on non-conservative collision avoidance between robots and obstacles with control affine dynamics and convex shapes. System safety is defined using the minimum distance between the safe regions associated with robots…
In advanced manufacturing, strict safety guarantees are required to allow humans and robots to work together in a shared workspace. One of the challenges in this application field is the variety and unpredictability of human behavior,…
Miniaturized instruments are highly needed for robot assisted medical healthcare and treatment, especially for less invasive surgery as it empowers more flexible access to restricted anatomic intervention. But the robotic design is more…
Artificial perception is traditionally handled by hand-designing task specific algorithms. However, a truly autonomous robot should develop perceptive abilities on its own, by interacting with its environment, and adapting to new…
This paper introduces a safety filter to ensure collision avoidance for multirotor aerial robots. The proposed formalism leverages a single Composite Control Barrier Function from all position constraints acting on a third-order nonlinear…
Motion planning under sensing uncertainty is critical for robots in unstructured environments to guarantee safety for both the robot and any nearby humans. Most work on planning under uncertainty does not scale to high-dimensional robots…
For safe operation, a robot must be able to avoid collisions in uncertain environments. Existing approaches for motion planning under uncertainties often assume parametric obstacle representations and Gaussian uncertainty, which can be…
Shared autonomy provides a framework where a human and an automated system, such as a robot, jointly control the system's behavior, enabling an effective solution for various applications, including human-robot interaction. However, a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free…
Robotic manipulation in complex scenes demands precise perception of task-relevant details, yet fixed or suboptimal viewpoints often impair fine-grained perception and induce occlusions, constraining imitation-learned policies. We present…
This paper presents algorithms to navigate and avoid obstacles for an in-door autonomous mobile robot. A laser range finder is used to obtain 3D images of the environment. A new algorithm, namely 3D-to-2D image pressure and barriers…
Laparoscopic surgery constrains instrument motion around a fixed pivot point at the incision into a patient to minimize tissue trauma. Surgical robots achieve this through either hardware to software-based remote center of motion (RCM)…
Robot manipulation in unstructured environments requires efficient and reliable Swept Volume Collision Detection (SVCD) for safe motion planning. Traditional discrete methods potentially miss collisions between these points, whereas SVCD…
Vitreoretinal surgery pertains to the treatment of delicate tissues on the fundus of the eye using thin instruments. Surgeons frequently rotate the eye during surgery, which is called orbital manipulation, to observe regions around the…
Intraoperative segmentation and tracking of minimally invasive instruments is a prerequisite for computer- and robotic-assisted surgery. Since additional hardware like tracking systems or the robot encoders are cumbersome and lack accuracy,…
As robots move from the laboratory into the real world, motion planning will need to account for model uncertainty and risk. For robot motions involving intermittent contact, planning for uncertainty in contact is especially important, as…
Training agents to autonomously learn how to use anthropomorphic robotic hands has the potential to lead to systems capable of performing a multitude of complex manipulation tasks in unstructured and uncertain environments. In this work, we…