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Mechanical interactions between rigid rings and flexible cables find broad application in both daily life (hanging clothes) and engineering systems (closing a tether-net). A reduced-order method for the dynamic analysis of sliding rings on…
Shells, i.e., objects made of a thin layer of material following a surface, are among the most common structures in use. They are highly efficient, in terms of material required to maintain strength, but also prone to deformation and…
We propose an algorithm for optimizations in which the gradients contain stochastic noise. This arises, for example, in structural optimizations when computations of forces and stresses rely on methods involving Monte Carlo sampling, such…
This paper studies hidden convexity properties associated with constrained optimization problems over the set of rotation matrices $\text{SO}(n)$. Such problems are nonconvex due to the constraint $X \in \text{SO}(n)$. Nonetheless, we show…
With the field of rigid-body robotics having matured in the last fifty years, routing, planning, and manipulation of deformable objects have recently emerged as a more untouched research area in many fields ranging from surgical robotics to…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
In this paper we report a new promising idea on the design and manufacturing of ply composite structures, tailored to exhibit maximum stiffness under given weight constraints and loading conditions. It is based on the idea behind an…
In this paper, the problem of reaching formation for a network of rigid agents over a special orthogonal group is investigated by considering bearing-only constraints as the desired formation. Each agent is able to gather the measurements…
Effectively rearranging heterogeneous objects constitutes a high-utility skill that an intelligent robot should master. Whereas significant work has been devoted to the grasp synthesis of heterogeneous objects, little attention has been…
Variable projection solves structured optimization problems by completely minimizing over a subset of the variables while iterating over the remaining variables. Over the last 30 years, the technique has been widely used, with empirical and…
An elastic rod, straight in its undeformed state, has a mass attached at one end and a variable length, due to a constraint at the other end by a frictionless sliding sleeve. The constraint is arranged with the sliding direction parallel to…
Rod-based structures are commonly used in practical applications in science and engineering. However, in many design, analysis, and manufacturing tasks, handling the rod-based structures in three dimensions directly is generally…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…
3D Reconstruction of moving articulated objects without additional information about object structure is a challenging problem. Current methods overcome such challenges by employing category-specific skeletal models. Consequently, they do…
This paper devises a novel lowest-order conforming virtual element method (VEM) for planar linear elasticity with the pure displacement/traction boundary condition. The main trick is to view a generic polygon $K$ as a new one…
This paper presents a numerical method for the simulation of fluid-structure interaction specifically tailored to interactions between Newtonian fluids and a large number of slender viscoelastic Cosserat rods. Because of their high…
We present a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian method for the direct simulation of three-dimensional, heterogeneous structures made of soft fibers and immersed in incompressible viscous fluids. Fiber-based organization of matter is pervasive in…
Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…
A common task in robotics is unloading identical goods from a tray with rectangular grid structure. This naturally leads to the idea of programming the process at one grid position only and translating the motion to the other grid points,…