Related papers: Using Contact to Increase Robot Performance for Gl…
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…
Grasping objects under uncertainty remains an open problem in robotics research. This uncertainty is often due to noisy or partial observations of the object pose or shape. To enable a robot to react appropriately to unforeseen effects, it…
Controlling robots that dynamically engage in contact with their environment is a pressing challenge. Whether a legged robot making-and-breaking contact with a floor, or a manipulator grasping objects, contact is everywhere. Unfortunately,…
Recent studies on quadruped robots have focused on either locomotion or mobile manipulation using a robotic arm. Legged robots can manipulate heavier and larger objects using non-prehensile manipulation primitives, such as planar pushing,…
In this work we present a trajectory Optimization framework for whole-body motion planning through contacts. We demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to automatically discover different gaits and dynamic motions on a…
In collaborative human-robot tasks, safety requires not only avoiding collisions but also ensuring safe, intentional physical contact. We present ContactRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that directly incorporates contact…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
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…
Contact-rich manipulation demands human-like integration of perception and force feedback: vision should guide task progress, while high-frequency interaction control must stabilize contact under uncertainty. Existing learning-based…
Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
This paper presents Contact Mode Guided Manipulation Planning (CMGMP) for 3D quasistatic and quasidynamic rigid body motion planning in dexterous manipulation. The CMGMP algorithm generates hybrid motion plans including both continuous…
Contact-implicit trajectory optimization offers an appealing method of automatically generating complex and contact-rich behaviors for robot manipulation and locomotion. The scalability of such techniques has been limited, however, by the…
In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Trajectory generation in confined environment is crucial for wide adoption of intelligent robot manipulators. In this paper, we propose a novel motion planning approach for redundant robot arms that uses a hybrid optimization framework to…
Manipulation planning is the problem of finding a sequence of robot configurations that involves interactions with objects in the scene, e.g., grasping and placing an object, or more general tool-use. To achieve such interactions,…
The paper presents a planner to generate walking trajectories by using the centroidal dynamics and the full kinematics of a humanoid robot. The interaction between the robot and the walking surface is modeled explicitly via new conditions,…
Constrained environments are common in practical applications of manipulating deformable linear objects (DLOs), where movements of both DLOs and robots should be constrained. This task is high-dimensional and highly constrained owing to the…
The problem of coordination without a priori information about the environment is important in robotics. Applications vary from formation control to search and rescue. This paper considers the problem of search by a group of solitary…