Related papers: Dynamic Grasping with a "Soft" Drone: From Theory …
Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…
The size of a narrow gap traversable by a fixed-wing drone is limited by its wingspan. Inspired by birds, here, we enable the traversal of a gap of sub-wingspan width and height using a morphing-wing drone capable of temporarily sweeping in…
The ability of robotic grippers to not only grasp but also re-position and re-orient objects in-hand is crucial for achieving versatile, general-purpose manipulation. While recent advances in soft robotic grasping has greatly improved grasp…
In this work, an experimental characterization of the configuration space of a soft, pneumatically actuated morphing quadrotor is presented, with a focus on precise thrust characterization of its flexible arms, considering the effect of…
In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming…
Robot arms that assist humans should be able to pick up, move, and release everyday objects. Today's assistive robot arms use rigid grippers to pinch items between fingers; while these rigid grippers are well suited for large and heavy…
Grasping in dynamic environments presents a unique set of challenges. A stable and reachable grasp can become unreachable and unstable as the target object moves, motion planning needs to be adaptive and in real time, the delay in…
Drones have gained popularity in a wide range of field ranging from aerial photography, aerial mapping, and investigation of electric power lines. Every drone that we know today is carrying out some kind of control algorithm at the low…
Over the past few decades, efforts have been made towards robust robotic grasping, and therefore dexterous manipulation. The soft gripper has shown their potential in robust grasping due to their inherent properties-low, control complexity,…
Morphing multirotors, such as the Foldable Drone , can increase the versatility of drones employing in-flight-adaptive-morphology. To further increase precision in their tasks, recent works have investigated stable flight in asymmetric…
The autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing drones is hard when the coordination requires the actuation over their speeds since they are critically bounded and aircraft are mostly designed to fly at a nominal airspeed. This paper proposes…
Robotic hands with soft surfaces can perform stable grasping, but the high friction of the soft surfaces makes it difficult to release objects, or to perform operations that require sliding. To solve this issue, we previously developed a…
This paper investigates payload grasping from a moving platform using a hook-equipped aerial manipulator. First, a computationally efficient trajectory optimization based on complementarity constraints is proposed to determine the optimal…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…
Learning to control robots without requiring engineered models has been a long-term goal, promising diverse and novel applications. Yet, reinforcement learning has only achieved limited impact on real-time robot control due to its high…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) comprise multiple drone units with reconfigurable connected formations, providing high adaptability to diverse mission scenarios, fault conditions, and payload capacities. However, existing control…
In the robotic crop harvesting environment, foreign objects intrusion in the gripper workspace is frequently occurring and unignorable, however, rarely addressed. This paper presents a novel intelligent robotic grasping method capable of…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Grasping in cluttered environments is a fundamental but challenging robotic skill. It requires both reasoning about unseen object parts and potential collisions with the manipulator. Most existing data-driven approaches avoid this problem…