Related papers: Convex Controller Synthesis for Robot Contact

In this paper, we consider the problem of controller design using approximately bisimilar abstractions with an emphasis on safety and reachability specifications. We propose abstraction-based approaches to solve both classes of problems. We…

Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…

Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe…

In many multi-agent systems, communication is limited by bandwidth, latency, and energy constraints. Designing controllers that achieve coordination and safety with minimal communication is critical for scalable and reliable deployment.…

For successful object manipulation with robotic hands, it is important to ensure that the object remains in the grasp at all times. In addition to grasp constraints associated with slipping and singular hand configurations, excessive…

Robots with flexible spines based on tensegrity structures have potential advantages over traditional designs with rigid torsos. However, these robots can be difficult to control due to their high-dimensional nonlinear dynamics and actuator…

Controller synthesis is the process of constructing a correct system automatically from its specification. This often requires assumptions about the behaviour of the environment. It is difficult for the designer to identify the assumptions…

Control of complex systems involves both system identification and controller design. Deep neural networks have proven to be successful in many identification tasks, however, from model-based control perspective, these networks are…

Humanoid robots locomote by making and breaking contacts with their environment. A crucial problem is therefore to find precise criteria for a given contact to remain stable or to break. For rigid surface contacts, the most general…

Conventional feedback control methods can solve various types of robot control problems very efficiently by capturing the structure with explicit models, such as rigid body equations of motion. However, many control problems in modern…

In co-manipulative continuum robots (CCRs), multiple continuum arms cooperate by grasping a common flexible object, forming a closed-chain deformable mechanical system. The closed-chain coupling induces strong dynamic interactions and…

Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…

Shared control combines human intention with autonomous decision-making. At the low level, the primary goal is to maintain safety regardless of the user's input to the system. However, existing shared control methods-based on, e.g., Model…

In the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), many researchers study shared control systems. Shared control is when a person and agent both contribute to the performance of a task in a collaborative way, often by providing control inputs…

We present a novel method for global motion planning of robotic systems that interact with the environment through contacts. Our method directly handles the hybrid nature of such tasks using tools from convex optimization. We formulate the…

Deadline misses are more common in real-world systems than one may expect. The weakly-hard task model has become a standard abstraction to describe and analyze how often these misses occur, and has been especially used in control…

We consider the problem of how to deploy a controller to a (networked) cyber-physical system (CPS). Controlling a CPS is an involved task, and synthesizing a controller to respect sensing, actuation, and communication constraints is only…

Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…

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 introduces the notion of an Input Constrained Control Barrier Function (ICCBF), as a method to synthesize safety-critical controllers for non-linear control affine systems with input constraints. The method identifies a subset of…