Related papers: Switching Model Predictive Control for Online Stru…
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…
As environments involving both robots and humans become increasingly common, so does the need to account for people during planning. To plan effectively, robots must be able to respond to and sometimes influence what humans do. This…
This paper introduces for the first time the design, modelling, and control of a novel morphing multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that we call the OmniMorph. The morphing ability allows the selection of the configuration that…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
The ability of aerial robots to operate in the presence of failures is crucial in various applications that demand continuous operations, such as surveillance, monitoring, and inspection. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant control…
The goal of this thesis is to propose the combination of Control-Barrier-Functions (CBF) with Model-Predictive-Control (MPC) resulting in the novel Model-Predictive-Control-Barrier-Function (MPCBF). It can be shown, that the performance of…
Model predictive control (MPC) has become increasingly popular for the control of robot manipulators due to its improved performance compared to instantaneous control approaches. However, tuning these controllers remains a considerable…
In this paper we present a maneuver regulation scheme for Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Differently from standard trajectory tracking, maneuver regulation has an intrinsic robustness due to the fact that…
We present an orientation adaptive controller to compensate for the effects of highly constrained environments on continuum manipulator actuation. A transformation matrix updated using optimal estimation techniques from optical flow…
This work addresses the practical problem of distributed formation tracking control of a group of quadrotor vehicles in a relaxed sensing graph topology with a very limited sensor set, where only one leader vehicle can access the global…
For many tasks, predictive path-following control can significantly improve the performance and robustness of autonomous robots over traditional trajectory tracking control. It does this by prioritizing closeness to the path over timed…
Autonomous navigation of steel bridge inspection robots is essential for proper maintenance. The majority of existing robotic solutions for bridge inspection require human intervention to assist in the control and navigation. In this paper,…
Tilt rotor aircraft combine the benefits of both helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, this makes them popular for a variety of applications, including Search and Rescue and VVIP transport. However, due to the multiple flight modes,…
The mechanical simplicity, hover capabilities, and high agility of quadrotors lead to a fast adaption in the industry for inspection, exploration, and urban aerial mobility. On the other hand, the unstable and underactuated dynamics of…
The robotic manipulation of compliant objects is currently one of the most active problems in robotics due to its potential to automate many important applications. Despite the progress achieved by the robotics community in recent years,…
Pushing is a useful robotic capability for positioning and reorienting objects. The ability to accurately predict the effect of pushes can enable efficient trajectory planning and complicated object manipulation. Physical prediction models…
This thesis presents a unified control framework for agile and fault-tolerant flight of the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) in aerial mode. The M4 robot is capable of transitioning between ground and aerial locomotion. The articulated…
Despite their effectiveness and popularity in offline or model-based reinforcement learning (RL), transformers remain underexplored in online model-free RL due to their sensitivity to training setups and model design decisions such as how…
Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher payload-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to…
This paper investigates tracking controls for an arbitrary number of cooperating quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles with a suspended rigid body payload. Assuming that a rigid body is connected to multiple quadrotors by rigid massless links,…