Related papers: ContactNets: Learning Discontinuous Contact Dynami…
Contact modeling plays a central role in motion planning, simulation, and control of legged robots, as legged locomotion is realized through contact. The two prevailing approaches to model the contact consider rigid and compliant premise at…
This study proposes novel control methods that lower impact force by preemptive movement and smoothly transition to conventional contact impedance control. These suggested techniques are for force control-based robots and position/velocity…
Accurately modeling contact behaviors for real-world, near-rigid materials remains a grand challenge for existing rigid-body physics simulators. This paper introduces a data-augmented contact model that incorporates analytical solutions…
This paper investigates one of the most challenging tasks in dynamic manipulation -- catching large-momentum moving objects. Beyond the realm of quasi-static manipulation, dealing with highly dynamic objects can significantly improve the…
Current robot architectures for modeling interaction behavior are not well suited to the dual task of sequencing discrete actions and incorporating information instantly. Additionally, for communication based on body motion, actions also…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
Dynamic fragmentation simulations are essential for predicting material response at high strain rates, yet explicit dynamic simulations that combine an extrinsic cohesive-zone model (CZM) with penalty-based contact often exhibit severe…
With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft…
Model generalization of the underlying dynamics is critical for achieving data efficiency when learning for robot control. This paper proposes a novel approach for learning dynamics leveraging the symmetry in the underlying robotic system,…
In this project we trained a neural network to perform specific interactions between a robot and objects in the environment, through imitation learning. In particular, we tackle the task of moving the robot to a fixed pose with respect to a…
Ensuring symmetric stiffness in impedance-controlled robots is crucial for physically meaningful and stable interaction in contact-rich manipulation. Conventional approaches neglect the change of basis vectors in curved spaces, leading to…
Musculoskeletal robots that are based on pneumatic actuation have a variety of properties, such as compliance and back-drivability, that render them particularly appealing for human-robot collaboration. However, programming interactive and…
We present an efficient, accurate, and robust method for simulation of dense suspensions of deformable and rigid particles immersed in Stokesian fluid in two dimensions. We use a well-established boundary integral formulation for the…
Historically, feature-based approaches have been used extensively for camera-based robot perception tasks such as localization, mapping, tracking, and others. Several of these approaches also combine other sensors (inertial sensing, for…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…
With the maturation of differentiable physics, its role in various downstream applications: such as model predictive control, robotic design optimization, and neural PDE solvers, has become increasingly important. However, the derivative…
A core challenge for an agent learning to interact with the world is to predict how its actions affect objects in its environment. Many existing methods for learning the dynamics of physical interactions require labeled object information.…
Simulating rigid-body dynamics with contact in a fast, massively vectorizable, and smoothly differentiable manner is highly desirable in robotics. An important bottleneck faced by existing differentiable simulation frameworks is contact…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…