Related papers: A Comparative Analysis of Contact Models in Trajec…
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…
We present in-hand manipulation tasks where a robot moves an object in grasp, maintains its external contact mode with the environment, and adjusts its in-hand pose simultaneously. The proposed manipulation task leads to complex contact…
Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…
Accurately modeling contact behaviors for real-world, near-rigid materials remains a grand challenge for existing rigid-body physics simulators. This paper introduces a data-augmented contact model that incorporates analytical solutions…
Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for robot planning and feedback control. It is characterized by underactuation, hybrid control, and contact uncertainty. One main difficulty is to determine both the…
In this work, we present an extension to a linear Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme that plans external contact forces for the robot when given multiple contact locations and their corresponding friction cone. To this end, we set up a…
We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a…
This paper presents a tool for addressing a key component in many algorithms for planning robot trajectories under uncertainty: evaluation of the safety of a robot whose actions are governed by a closed-loop feedback policy near a nominal…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the…
Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance…
In hybrid force-velocity control, the robot can use velocity control in some directions to follow a trajectory, while performing force control in other directions to maintain contacts with the environment regardless of positional errors. We…
In this paper, we devise methods for the multi- objective control of humanoid robots, a.k.a. prioritized whole- body controllers, that achieve efficiency and robustness in the algorithmic computations. We use a form of whole-body…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
This paper presents a data-efficient approach to learning transferable forward models for robotic push manipulation. Our approach extends our previous work on contact-based predictors by leveraging information on the pushed object's local…
Achieving reactive robot behavior in complex dynamic environments is still challenging as it relies on being able to solve trajectory optimization problems quickly enough, such that we can replan the future motion at frequencies which are…
Contact planning is crucial in locomoting systems.Specifically, appropriate contact planning can enable versatile behaviors (e.g., sidewinding in limbless locomotors) and facilitate speed-dependent gait transitions (e.g., walk-trot-gallop…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We…
We propose factor graph optimization for simultaneous planning, control, and trajectory estimation for collision-free navigation of autonomous systems in environments with moving objects. The proposed online probabilistic motion planning…