Related papers: Simultaneous Trajectory Optimization and Force Con…
Practical deployments of coordinated fleets of mobile robots in different environments have revealed the benefits of maintaining small distances between robots, especially as they move at higher speeds. However, this is counter-intuitive in…
Trajectory optimization is a fundamental problem in robotics. While optimization of continuous control trajectories is well developed, many applications require both discrete and continuous, i.e., hybrid, controls. Finding an optimal…
This paper deals with the robust force and position control problems of Series Elastic Actuators. It is shown that a Series Elastic Actuator's force control problem can be described by a second-order dynamic model which suffers from only…
Generating obstacle-free trajectories for robotic manipulators in unstructured and cluttered environments remains a significant challenge. Existing motion planning methods often require additional computational effort to generate the final…
We present an efficient spacetime optimization method to automatically generate animations for a general volumetric, elastically deformable body. Our approach can model the interactions between the body and the environment and automatically…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
A redundant manipulator has multiple inverse kinematics solutions per end-effector pose. Accordingly, there can be many trajectories for joints that follow a given endeffector path in the Cartesian space. In this paper, we present a…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interaction with uncertainty…
In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…
An effective method for optimizing path planning for a specific model of a 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) robot manipulator is presented as part of the motion planning of the manipulator using computer algebra. We assume that we are given a…
In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…
Contact detection for continuum and soft robots has been limited in past works to statics or kinematics-based methods with assumed circular bending curvature or known bending profiles. In this paper, we adapt the generalized momentum…
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,…
Learning from real-world robot demonstrations holds promise for interacting with complex real-world environments. However, the complexity and variability of interaction dynamics often cause purely positional controllers to struggle with…
A hierarchical control architecture is presented for energy-efficient control of legged robots subject to variety of linear/nonlinear inequality constraints such as Coulomb friction cones, switching unilateral contacts, actuator saturation…
This paper uses a mobile manipulator with a collaborative robotic arm to manipulate objects beyond the robot's maximum payload. It proposes a single-shot probabilistic roadmap-based method to plan and optimize manipulation motion with…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
Applying intelligent robot arms in dynamic uncertain environments (i.e., flexible production lines) remains challenging, which requires efficient algorithms for real time trajectory generation. The motion planning problem for robot…
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
This paper discusses the utility of using simple stiffness and vibrations models, based on the Jacobian matrix of a manipulator and only the rigidity of the actuators, whenever its geometry is optimised. In many works, these simplified…