Related papers: Keep soft robots soft -- a data-driven based trade…
Due to their compliant structure, industrial robots without precision-enhancing measures are only to a limited extent suitable for machining applications. Apart from structural, thermal and bearing deformations, the main cause for compliant…
We consider the problem of direct data-driven predictive control for unknown stochastic linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with partial state observation. Building upon our previous research on data-driven stochastic control, this paper…
A reliable controller is critical for execution of safe and smooth maneuvers of an autonomous vehicle. The controller must be robust to external disturbances, such as road surface, weather, wind conditions, and so on. It also needs to deal…
Purpose of review: We review recent advances in algorithmic development and validation for modeling and control of soft robots leveraging the Koopman operator theory. Recent findings: We identify the following trends in recent research…
Data availability has dramatically increased in recent years, driving model-based control methods to exploit learning techniques for improving the system description, and thus control performance. Two key factors that hinder the practical…
Physical human-robot interaction can improve human ergonomics, task efficiency, and the flexibility of automation, but often requires application-specific methods to detect human state and determine robot response. At the same time, many…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
This work develops a novel trajectory planner for human-robot handovers. The handover requirements can naturally be handled by a path-following-based model predictive controller, where the path progress serves as a progress measure of the…
The paper presents a complete pipeline for learning continuous motion control policies for a mobile robot when only a non-differentiable physics simulator of robot-terrain interactions is available. The multi-modal state estimation of the…
Soft microrobots based on photoresponsive materials and controlled by light fields can generate a variety of different gaits. This inherent flexibility can be exploited to maximize their locomotion performance in a given environment and…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
Robust control of complex engineered and biological systems hinges on the integration of feedforward and feedback mechanisms. This is exemplified in neural motor control, where feedforward muscle co-contraction complements sensory-driven…
When first principle models cannot be derived due to the complexity of the real system, data-driven methods allow us to build models from system observations. As these models are employed in learning-based control, the quality of the data…
Model predictive control allows to provide high performance and safety guarantees in the form of constraint satisfaction. These properties, however, can be satisfied only if the underlying model, used for prediction, of the controlled…
Soft robots can execute tasks with safer interactions. However, control techniques that can effectively exploit the systems' capabilities are still missing. Differential dynamic programming (DDP) has emerged as a promising tool for…
This paper presents a novel adaptive feedforward controller design for reset control systems. The combination of feedforward and reset feedback control promises high performance as the feedforward guarantees reference tracking, while the…
Gaussian Process (GP) regression is shown to be effective for learning unknown dynamics, enabling efficient and safety-aware control strategies across diverse applications. However, existing GP-based model predictive control (GP-MPC)…
Regression, unlike classification, has lacked a comprehensive and effective approach to deal with cost-sensitive problems by the reuse (and not a re-training) of general regression models. In this paper, a wide variety of cost-sensitive…
In this paper, we consider the problem of using a robot to explore an environment with an unknown, state-dependent disturbance function while avoiding some forbidden areas. The goal of the robot is to safely collect observations of the…
We propose a model predictive control approach for autonomous vehicles that exploits learned Gaussian processes for predicting human driving behavior. The proposed approach employs the uncertainty about the GP's prediction to achieve…