Related papers: Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization using Ort…

In this paper, we develop an interior-point method for solving a class of convex optimization problems with time-varying objective and constraint functions. Using log-barrier penalty functions, we propose a continuous-time dynamical system…

A typical manipulation task consists of a manipulator equipped with a gripper to grasp and move an object with constraints on the motion of the hand-held object, which may be due to the nature of the task itself or from object-environment…

Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…

Whole-body contact is an effective strategy for improving the stability and efficiency of the motion of robots. For robots to automatically perform such motions, we propose a posture generation method that employs all available surfaces of…

This paper presents a computationally efficient model predictive control formulation that uses an integral Chebyshev collocation method to enable rapid operations of autonomous agents. By posing the finite-horizon optimal control problem…

Autonomous exploration is an application of growing importance in robotics. A promising strategy is ergodic trajectory planning, whereby an agent spends in each area a fraction of time which is proportional to its probability information…

Efficient trajectory optimization is essential for avoiding collisions in unstructured environments, but it remains challenging to have both speed and quality in the solutions. One reason is that second-order optimality requires calculating…

We study the navigation problem for a robot moving amidst static and dynamic obstacles and rely on a hierarchical approach to solve it. First, the reference trajectory is planned by the safe interval path planning algorithm that is capable…

Trajectory optimization is a fundamental problem in robotics. While optimization of continuous control trajectories is well developed, many applications require both discrete and continuous, i.e., hybrid, controls. Finding an optimal…

This work addresses the challenge of a robot using real-time feedback from contact sensors to reliably manipulate a movable object on a cluttered tabletop. We formulate contact manipulation as a partially observable Markov decision process…

Contact adaption is an essential capability when manipulating objects. Two key contact modes of non-prehensile manipulation are sticking and sliding. This paper presents a Trajectory Optimization (TO) method formulated as a Mathematical…

Trajectory optimization under uncertainties is a challenging problem for robots in contact with the environment. Such uncertainties are inevitable due to estimation errors, control imperfections, and model mismatches between planning models…

An Optimal Transport (OT)-based decentralized collaborative multi-robot exploration strategy is proposed in this paper. This method is to achieve an efficient exploration with a predefined priority in the given domain. In this context, the…

Efficient robotic extraterrestrial exploration requires robots with diverse capabilities, ranging from scientific measurement tools to advanced locomotion. A robotic team enables the distribution of tasks over multiple specialized…

Planning trajectories for automated vehicles in urban environments requires methods with high generality, long planning horizons, and fast update rates. Using a path-velocity decomposition, we contribute a novel planning framework, which…

Autonomous robots require online trajectory planning capability to operate in the real world. Efficient offline trajectory planning methods already exist, but are computationally demanding, preventing their use online. In this paper, we…

We present a framework for bi-level trajectory optimization in which a system's dynamics are encoded as the solution to a constrained optimization problem and smooth gradients of this lower-level problem are passed to an upper-level…

Despite the great progress in quadrupedal robotics during the last decade, selecting good contacts (footholds) in highly uneven and cluttered environments still remains an open challenge. This paper builds upon a state-of-the-art approach,…

We present a new time integrator for articulated body dynamics. We formulate the governing equations of the dynamics using only the position variables and recast the position-based articulated dynamics as an optimization problem. Our…

Linear models for control and motion generation of humanoid robots have received significant attention in the past years, not only due to their well known theoretical guarantees, but also because of practical computational advantages.…