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Concentric Tube Robots (CTR) have the potential to enable effective minimally invasive surgeries. While extensive modeling and control schemes have been proposed in the past decade, limited efforts have been made to improve the trajectory…
Correct-by-construction manipulation planning in a dynamic environment, where other agents can manipulate objects in the workspace, is a challenging problem. The tight coupling of actions and motions between agents and complexity of mission…
This paper presents redundancy resolution and disturbance rejection via torque optimization in Hybrid Cable-Driven Robots (HCDRs). To begin with, we initiate a redundant HCDR for nonlinear whole-body system modeling and model reduction.…
Efficient and robust task planning for a human-robot collaboration (HRC) system remains challenging. The human-aware task planner needs to assign jobs to both robots and human workers so that they can work collaboratively to achieve better…
Recently, many humanoid robots have been increasingly deployed in various facilities, including hospitals and assisted living environments, where they are often remotely controlled by human operators. Their kinematic redundancy enhances…
Underactuated robots are characterized by a larger number of degrees of freedom than actuators and if they are designed with a specific mass distribution, they can be controlled by means of differential flatness theory. This structural…
This paper addresses the problem of adding redundancy to a collection of physical objects so that the overall system is more robust to failures. In contrast to its information counterpart, which can exploit parity to protect multiple…
For a team of heterogeneous robots executing multiple tasks, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally allocate tasks to robots while accounting for their different capabilities. Motivated by the need that robot teams have in many…
Sidewalk delivery robots are a promising solution for last-mile freight distribution. Yet, they operate in dynamic environments characterized by pedestrian flows and potential obstacles, which make travel times highly uncertain and can…
Several systems possess the flexibility to serve requests in more than one way. For instance, a distributed storage system storing multiple replicas of the data can serve a request from any of the multiple servers that store the requested…
We present a novel method for optimizing the posture of kinematically redundant torque-controlled robots to improve robustness during impacts. A rigid impact model is used as the basis for a configuration-dependent metric that quantifies…
Shared autonomy provides an effective framework for human-robot collaboration that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of humans and robots to achieve common goals. Many existing approaches to shared autonomy make restrictive…
In order to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, intelligent robots need to carry out high-level, abstract planning and reasoning in conjunction with motion planning. However, abstract models are typically lossy and plans or policies computed…
Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…
Workforce optimization plays a crucial role in efficient organizational operations where decision-making may span several different administrative and time scales. For instance, dispatching personnel to immediate service requests while…
Many robotic systems deal with uncertainty by performing a sequence of information gathering actions. In this work, we focus on the problem of efficiently constructing such a sequence by drawing an explicit connection to submodularity.…
The problem of assigning agents to tasks is a central computational challenge in many multi-agent autonomous systems. However, in the real world, agents are not always perfect and may fail due to a number of reasons. A motivating…
Despite its maturity, the field of fault-tolerant redundancy suffers from significant terminological fragmentation, where functionally equivalent methods are frequently described under disparate names across academic and industrial domains.…
We develop a dynamical systems approach to prioritizing and selecting multiple recurring tasks with the aim of conferring a degree of deliberative goal selection to a mobile robot confronted with competing objectives. We take navigation as…
This paper presents a solution for the problem of optimal planning for a robot in a collaborative human-robot team, where the human supervisor is intermittently available to assist the robot in completing tasks more quickly. Specifically,…