Related papers: Efficient Multi-Contact Pattern Generation with Se…

Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…

Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…

Whole-body contact is an effective strategy for improving the stability and efficiency of the motion of robots. For robots to automatically perform such motions, we propose a posture generation method that employs all available surfaces of…

Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate complex holistic movements and multiple contact interactions…

We present a computational design system that assists users to model, optimize, and fabricate quad-robots with soft skins.Our system addresses the challenging task of predicting their physical behavior by fully integrating the multibody…

Mixed-integer convex programming (MICP) has seen significant algorithmic and hardware improvements with several orders of magnitude solve time speedups compared to 25 years ago. Despite these advances, MICP has been rarely applied to…

This technical report provides an in-depth evaluation of both established and state-of-the-art methods for simulating constrained rigid multi-body systems with hard-contact dynamics, using formulations of Nonlinear Complementarity Problems…

In this paper, we develop a fast mixed-integer convex programming (MICP) framework for multi-robot navigation by combining graph attention networks and distributed optimization. We formulate a mixed-integer optimization problem for receding…

Humans can exploit contacts anywhere on their body surface to manipulate large and heavy items, objects normally out of reach or multiple objects at once. However, such manipulation through contacts using the whole surface of the body…

We study the problem of asymptotic consensus as it occurs in a wide range of applications in both man-made and natural systems. In particular, we study systems with directed communication graphs that may change over time. We recently…

Robot footstep planning strategies can be divided in two main approaches: discrete searches and continuous optimizations. While discrete searches have been broadly applied, continuous optimizations approaches have been restricted for…

In contact-rich tasks, the hybrid, multi-modal nature of contact dynamics poses great challenges in model representation, planning, and control. Recent efforts have attempted to address these challenges via data-driven methods, learning…

We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact is assumed to be a planar non-convex contact patch. The planar non-convex contact patch…

Convex model predictive controls (MPCs) with a single rigid body model have demonstrated strong performance on real legged robots. However, convex MPCs are limited by their assumptions such as small rotation angle and pre-defined gait,…

This paper presents a contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) framework for the real-time discovery of multi-contact motions, without predefined contact mode sequences or foothold positions. This approach utilizes the…

Designing trajectories for manipulation through contact is challenging as it requires reasoning of object \& robot trajectories as well as complex contact sequences simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel framework for…

We present a reformulation of a contact-implicit optimization (CIO) approach that computes optimal trajectories for rigid-body systems in contact-rich settings. A hard-contact model is assumed, and the unilateral constraints are imposed in…

We describe a whole-body dynamic walking controller implemented as a convex quadratic program. The controller solves an optimal control problem using an approximate value function derived from a simple walking model while respecting 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…

In this paper we propose a method to improve the accuracy of trajectory optimization for dynamic robots with intermittent contact by using orthogonal collocation. Until recently, most trajectory optimization methods for systems with…