Related papers: Easing Reliance on Collision-free Planning with Co…

Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free…

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,…

Projected Inverse Dynamics Control (PIDC) is commonly used in robots subject to contact, especially in quadrupedal systems. Many methods based on such dynamics have been developed for quadrupedal locomotion tasks, and only a few works…

This paper investigates the control problem of steering a group of spherical mobile robots to cooperatively transport a spherical object. By controlling the movements of the robots to exert appropriate contact (pushing) forces, it is…

Task-space quadratic programming (QP) is an elegant approach for controlling robots subject to constraints. Yet, in the case of kinematic-controlled (i.e., high-gains position or velocity) robots, closed-loop QP control scheme can be prone…

Collision avoidance is a widely investigated topic in robotic applications. When applying collision avoidance techniques to a mobile robot, how to deal with the spatial structure of the robot still remains a challenge. In this paper, we…

We present experimental results using a passive whole-body control approach for quadruped robots that achieves dynamic locomotion while compliantly balancing the robot's trunk. We formulate the motion tracking as a Quadratic Program (QP)…

Robotic manipulators are often designed with more actuated degrees-of-freedom than required to fully control an end effector's position and orientation. These "redundant" manipulators can allow infinite joint configurations that satisfy a…

Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…

Robots usually establish contacts at rigid surfaces with near-zero relative velocities. Otherwise, impact-induced energy propagates in the robot's linkage and may cause irreversible damage to the hardware. Moreover, abrupt changes in…

Contact-rich manipulation is challenging due to dynamically-changing physical constraints by the contact mode changes undergone during manipulation. This paper proposes a versatile local planning and control framework for contact-rich…

Motion planning in high-dimensional space is a challenging task. In order to perform dexterous manipulation in an unstructured environment, a robot with many degrees of freedom is usually necessary, which also complicates its motion…

With the goal of enabling the exploitation of impacts in robotic manipulation, a new framework is presented for control of robotic manipulators that are tasked to execute nominally simultaneous impacts. In this framework, we employ tracking…

Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where…

This paper presents a constraint-aware control framework for underactuated aerial manipulators, enabling accurate end-effector trajectory tracking while explicitly accounting for safety and feasibility constraints. The control problem is…

With the aim of further enabling the exploitation of impacts in robotic manipulation, a control framework is presented that directly tackles the challenges posed by tracking control of robotic manipulators that are tasked to perform…

In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…

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…

While many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking contact with the environment, state-of-the-art control policies struggle to deal with the hybrid nature of multi-contact motion. Such…

Path planning and collision avoidance are challenging in complex and highly variable environments due to the limited horizon of events. In literature, there are multiple model- and learning-based approaches that require significant…