Related papers: Convex Controller Synthesis for Robot Contact
Control barrier functions are mathematical constructs used to guarantee safety for robotic systems. When integrated as constraints in a quadratic programming optimization problem, instantaneous control synthesis with real-time performance…
This paper addresses the problem of control synthesis for nonlinear optimal control problems in the presence of state and input constraints. The presented approach relies upon transforming the given problem into an infinite-dimensional…
Applications that require multi-robot systems to operate independently for extended periods of time in unknown or unstructured environments face a broad set of challenges, such as hardware degradation, changing weather patterns, or…
We consider the problem of synthesizing optimal linear feedback policies subject to arbitrary convex constraints on the feedback matrix. This is known to be a hard problem in the usual formulations ($\Htwo,\Hinf,\LQR$) and previous works…
In this paper, we study a safe control design for dynamical systems in the presence of uncertainty in a dynamical environment. The worst-case error approach is considered to formulate robust Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) in an…
Recent advances in learning-based perception systems have led to drastic improvements in the performance of robotic systems like autonomous vehicles and surgical robots. These perception systems, however, are hard to analyze and errors in…
Classic distributed control problems have an interesting dichotomy: they are either trivial or undecidable. If we allow the controllers to fully synchronize, then synthesis is trivial. In this case, controllers can effectively act as a…
This paper considers the optimal control for hybrid systems whose trajectories transition between distinct subsystems when state-dependent constraints are satisfied. Though this class of systems is useful while modeling a variety of…
As robots are deployed in complex situations, engineers and end users must develop a holistic understanding of their behaviors, capabilities, and limitations. Some behaviors are directly optimized by the objective function. They often…
When designing correct-by-construction controllers for autonomous collectives, three key challenges are the task specification, the modelling, and its use at practical scale. In this paper, we focus on a simple yet useful abstraction for…
We consider the feedback design for stabilizing a rigid body system by making and breaking multiple contacts with the environment without prespecifying the timing or the number of occurrence of the contacts. We model such a system as a…
We propose a control framework which can utilize tactile information by exploiting the complementarity structure of contact dynamics. Since many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking…
This article surveys the System Level Synthesis framework, which presents a novel perspective on constrained robust and optimal controller synthesis for linear systems. We show how SLS shifts the controller synthesis task from the design of…
The control of complex systems faces a trade-off between high performance and safety guarantees, which in particular restricts the application of learning-based methods to safety-critical systems. A recently proposed framework to address…
Control barrier functions have been demonstrated to be a useful method of ensuring constraint satisfaction for a wide class of controllers, however existing results are mostly restricted to continuous time systems of relative degree one.…
Task-space Passivity-Based Control (PBC) for manipulation has numerous appealing properties, including robustness to modeling error and safety for human-robot interaction. Existing methods perform poorly in singular configurations, however,…
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,…
Control barrier functions (CBFs) offer a powerful tool for enforcing safety specifications in control synthesis. This paper deals with the problem of constructing valid CBFs. Given a second-order system and any desired safety set with…
How are robots becoming smarter at interacting with their surroundings? Recent advances have reshaped how robots use tactile sensing to perceive and engage with the world. Tactile sensing is a game-changer, allowing robots to embed…
In this paper we present a reformulation--framed as a constrained optimization problem--of multi-robot tasks which are encoded through a cost function that is to be minimized. The advantages of this approach are multiple. The…