Related papers: Information Requirements of Collision-Based Microm…

A core challenge of multi-robot interactions is collision avoidance among robots with potentially conflicting objectives. We propose a game-theoretic method for collision avoidance based on rotating hyperplane constraints. These constraints…

We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…

Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…

Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…

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…

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 interactions with…

Due to their flexibility, dexterity, and compact size, Continuum Manipulators (CMs) can enhance minimally invasive interventions. In these procedures, the CM may be operated in proximity of sensitive organs; therefore, requiring accurate…

Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…

Navigation and guidance of autonomous vehicles is a fundamental problem in robotics, which has attracted intensive research in recent decades. This report is mainly concerned with provable collision avoidance of multiple autonomous vehicles…

The security issue of mobile robots has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose an intelligent physical attack to trap mobile robots into a preset position by learning the obstacle-avoidance mechanism…

Applications of safety, security, and rescue in robotics, such as multi-robot target tracking, involve the execution of information acquisition tasks by teams of mobile robots. However, in failure-prone or adversarial environments, robots…

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

Mobile manipulation in robotics is challenging due to the need of solving many diverse tasks, such as opening a door or picking-and-placing an object. Typically, a basic first-principles system description of the robot is available, thus…

This paper describes a framework for multi-robot coordination and motion planning with emphasis on inter-agent interactions. We focus on the characterization of inter-agent interactions with sufficient level of abstraction so as to allow…

Constraint-based control approaches offer a flexible way to specify robotic manipulation tasks and execute them on robots with many degrees of freedom. However, the specification of task constraints and their associated priorities usually…

Virtual borders are employed to allow humans the interactive and flexible restriction of their mobile robots' workspaces in human-centered environments, e.g. to exclude privacy zones from the workspace or to indicate certain areas for…

Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…

The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…

Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…

There is a growing interest in building autonomous systems that interact with complex environments. The difficulty associated with obtaining an accurate model for such environments poses a challenge to the task of assessing and guaranteeing…