Related papers: Optimal reachability and grasping for a soft manip…
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…
Motivated by fatigue damage models, this paper addresses optimal control problems governed by a non-smooth system featuring two non-differentiable mappings. This consists of a coupling between a doubly non-smooth history-dependent evolution…
This paper presents a trajectory optimization and control approach for the guidance of an orbital four-arm robot in extravehicular activities. The robot operates near the target spacecraft, enabling its arm's end-effectors to reach the…
Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are…
Soft actuators offer compliant and safe interaction with an unstructured environment compared to their rigid counterparts. However, control of these systems is often challenging because they are inherently under-actuated, have infinite…
Object manipulation in robotics faces challenges due to diverse object shapes, sizes, and fragility. Gripper-based methods offer precision and low degrees of freedom (DOF) but the gripper limits the kind of objects to grasp. On the other…
Neural Networks (NNs) can provide major empirical performance improvements for robotic systems, but they also introduce challenges in formally analyzing those systems' safety properties. In particular, this work focuses on estimating the…
Existence of optimal solutions and necessary optimality conditions for a controlled version of Moreau's sweeping process are derived. The control is a measurable ingredient of the dynamics and the constraint set is a polyhedron. The novelty…
This paper considers the problem of determining an optimal control action based on observed data. We formulate the problem assuming that the system can be modelled by a nonlinear state-space model, but where the model parameters, state and…
The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…
While multi-joint continuum robots are highly dexterous and flexible, designing an optimal robot can be challenging due to its kinematics involving curvatures. Hence, the current work presents a computational method developed to find…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…
We introduce a modeling framework for manipulation planning based on the formulation of the dynamics as a projected dynamical system. This method uses implicit signed distance functions and their gradients to formulate an equivalent…
A tracking type optimal control problem for a nonlinear and nonlocal kinetic Fokker-Planck equation which arises as the mean field limit of an interacting particle systems that is subject to distance dependent random fluctuations is…
This paper investigates optimal control problems formulated over a class of piecewise-smooth vector fields. Instead of optimizing over the discontinuous system directly, we instead formulate optimal control problems over a family of…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for robot planning and feedback control. It is characterized by underactuation, hybrid control, and contact uncertainty. One main difficulty is to determine both the…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…