Related papers: Modeling of Visco-Elastic Environments for Humanoi…

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…

A standard motion control with feedback of the output displacement cannot handle unforeseen contact with environment without penetrating into the soft, i.e. viscoelastic, materials or even damaging the fragile materials. Robotics and…

This paper presents a novel method to control humanoid robot dynamic loco-manipulation with multiple contact modes via multi-contact Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework. The proposed framework includes a multi-contact dynamics model…

Complex robotic systems require whole-body controllers to deal with contact interactions, handle closed kinematic chains, and track task-space control objectives. However, for many applications, safety-critical controllers are important to…

This paper presents a Robust Adaptive Backstepping Impedance Control (RABIC) strategy for robots operating in contact-rich and uncertain environments. The proposed control strategy considers the complete coupled dynamics of the system and…

Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…

Motion imitation is a pivotal and effective approach for humanoid robots to achieve a more diverse range of complex and expressive movements, making their performances more human-like. However, the significant differences in kinematics and…

Can we enable humanoid robots to generate rich, diverse, and expressive motions in the real world? We propose to learn a whole-body control policy on a human-sized robot to mimic human motions as realistic as possible. To train such a…

Generally, humanoid robots usually suffer significant impact force when walking or running in a non-predefined environment that could easily damage the actuators due to high stiffness. In recent years, the usages of passive, compliant…

Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…

Robust dynamic interactions are required to move robots in daily environments alongside humans. Optimisation and learning methods have been used to mimic and reproduce human movements. However, they are often not robust and their…

We present a general approach for controlling robotic systems that make and break contact with their environments. Contact-implicit model predictive control (CI-MPC) generalizes linear MPC to contact-rich settings by utilizing a bi-level…

Collaborative robots can relief human operators from excessive efforts during payload lifting activities. Modelling the human partner allows the design of safe and efficient collaborative strategies. In this paper, we present a control…

Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…

Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…

Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…

Simplified models of the dynamics such as the linear inverted pendulum model (LIPM) have proven to perform well for biped walking on flat ground. However, for more complex tasks the assumptions of these models can become limiting. For…

Reduced-order template models are widely used to control high degree-of-freedom legged robots, but existing methods for template-based whole-body control rely heavily on heuristics and often suffer from robustness issues. In this letter, we…

We present a novel method of optimal robust control through quadratic programs that offers tracking stability while subject to input and state-based constraints as well as safety-critical constraints for nonlinear dynamical robotic systems…