Related papers: Robotic Assembly across Multiple Contact Stiffness…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Safety filters based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a practical tool for the safety-critical control of autonomous systems. These approaches encode safety through a value function and enforce safety by imposing a…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments pose significant robustness challenges for robot learning, where unexpected collisions can cause damage and hinder policy acquisition. Existing soft end-effectors face fundamental…
Multi-part assembly poses significant challenges for robots to execute long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation with generalization across complex geometries. We present Fabrica, a dual-arm robotic system capable of end-to-end planning and…
We introduce a sample-efficient method for learning state-dependent stiffness control policies for dexterous manipulation. The ability to control stiffness facilitates safe and reliable manipulation by providing compliance and robustness to…
We introduce CRAFT hand, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance for contact-rich manipulation. The design is based on a simple idea: contact is not uniform across the hand. Impacts concentrate at joints, while…
Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…
This paper explores the idea that skillful assembly is best represented as dynamic sequences of Manipulation Primitives, and that such sequences can be automatically discovered by Reinforcement Learning. Manipulation Primitives, such as…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
This paper presents a novel method for assistive load carrying using quadruped robots. The controller uses proprioceptive sensor data to estimate external base wrench, that is used for precise control of the robot's acceleration during…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
Motion planning is a computationally intensive and well-studied problem in autonomous robots. However, motion planning hardware accelerators (MPA) must be soft-error resilient for deployment in safety-critical applications, and blanket…
Automating the assembly of objects from their parts is a complex problem with innumerable applications in manufacturing, maintenance, and recycling. Unlike existing research, which is limited to target segmentation, pose regression, or…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting soft robots' behavior, but its computation time can limit practical applications. In this paper, a learning-based approach based on condensation of the FEM model is…
Multiple Peg-in-Hole (MPiH) assembly is one of the fundamental tasks in robotic assembly. In the MPiH tasks for large-size parts, it is challenging for a single manipulator to simultaneously align multiple distant pegs and holes,…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
Sliding friction between two dry surfaces is reasonably described by the speed-independent Amonton-Coulomb friction force law. However, there are many situations where the frictional contact points between two surfaces are "active" and may…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
The programming of robotic assembly tasks is a key component in manufacturing and automation. Force-sensitive assembly, however, often requires reactive strategies to handle slight changes in positioning and unforeseen part jamming.…