Related papers: Angle rigidity and its usage to stabilize planar f…

Most rigid formation controllers reported in the literature aim to only stabilize a rigid formation shape, while the formation orientation is not controlled. This paper studies the problem of controlling rigid formations with prescribed…

Mobile robots are ubiquitous. Such vehicles benefit from well-designed and calibrated control algorithms ensuring their task execution under precise uncertainty bounds. Yet, in tasks involving humans in the loop, such as elderly or mobility…

This paper develops an algorithm that guides a multi-robot system in an unknown environment in search of fixed targets. The area to be scanned contains an unknown number of convex obstacles of unknown size and shape. The algorithm covers…

In formation control, an ensemble of autonomous agents is required to stabilize at a given configuration in the plane, doing so while agents are allowed to observe only a subset of the ensemble. As such, formation control provides a rich…

Mutual localization provides a consensus of reference frame as an essential basis for cooperation in multirobot systems. Previous works have developed certifiable and robust solvers for relative transformation estimation between each pair…

Despite the great success of using gradient-based controllers to stabilize rigid formations of autonomous agents in the past years, surprising yet intriguing undesirable collective motions have been reported recently when inconsistent…

Constraining motion to a flat surface is a fundamental requirement for equipment across science and engineering. Modern precision robotic motion systems, such as gantries, rely on the flatness of components, including guide rails and…

We address the issue of angular measure, which is a contested issue for the International System of Units (SI). We provide a mathematically rigorous and axiomatic presentation of angular measure that leads to the traditional way of…

The paper focuses on the calibration of elastostatic parameters of spatial anthropomorphic robots. It proposes a new strategy for optimal selection of the measurement configurations that essentially increases the efficiency of robot…

Random packings of stiff rods are self-supporting mechanical structures stabilized by long range interactions induced by contacts. To understand the geometrical and topological complexity of the packings, we first deploy X-ray computerized…

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a robust motion formation distributed control algorithm for a team of mobile robots. The primary task for the team is to form a geometric shape, which can be freely translated and…

We propose an adaptive regularization scheme in a variational framework where a convex composite energy functional is optimized. We consider a number of imaging problems including denoising, segmentation and motion estimation, which are…

This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling an on-orbit assembly mission scenario of a large flexible structure using a multi-arm robot. This methodology accounts for significant changes in inertia and flexibility…

Singularity analysis is essential in robot kinematics, as singular configurations cause loss of control and kinematic indeterminacy. This paper models singularities in bar frameworks as saddle points on constrained manifolds. Given an…

The problem of estimating the angular speed of a solid body from attitude measurements is addressed. To solve this problem, we propose an observer whose dynamics are not constrained to evolve on any specific manifold. This drastically…

In the pattern formation problem, robots in a system must self-coordinate to form a given pattern, regardless of translation, rotation, uniform-scaling, and/or reflection. In other words, a valid final configuration of the system is a…

In order to manipulate a deformable object, such as rope or cloth, in unstructured environments, robots need a way to estimate its current shape. However, tracking the shape of a deformable object can be challenging because of the object's…

Bearing-based distributed formation control is attractive because it can be implemented using vision-based measurements to achieve a desired formation. Gradient-descent-based controllers using bearing measurements have been shown to have…

A deterministic attitude estimation problem for a rigid body in a potential field, with bounded attitude and angular velocity measurement errors is considered. An attitude estimation algorithm that globally minimizes the attitude estimation…

In this paper, we propose a novel framework called rigid body localization for joint position and orientation estimation of a rigid body. We consider a setup in which a few sensors are mounted on a rigid body. The absolute position of the…