Related papers: Easing Reliance on Collision-free Planning with Co…
We propose a control framework which can utilize tactile information by exploiting the complementarity structure of contact dynamics. Since many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking…
Real-time control is an essential aspect of safe robot operation in the real world with dynamic objects. We present a framework for the analysis of object-aware controllers, methods for altering a robot's motion to anticipate and avoid…
This paper presents a framework for safe navigation of a unicycle point robot to a goal position in an environment populated with obstacles from almost any admissible state, considering input limits. We introduce a novel QP formulation to…
The article develops an impact-resilient aerial robot (s-ARQ) equipped with a compliant arm to sense contacts and reduce collision impact and featuring a real-time contact force estimator and a non-linear motion controller to handle…
Nonlinear controllers for floating base systems in contact with the environment are often framed as quadratic programming (QP) optimization problems. Common drawbacks of such QP based controllers are: the control input often experiences…
Quadratic Programs (QPs) have become a mature technology for the control of robots of all kinds, including humanoid robots. One aspect has been largely overlooked, however, which is the accuracy with which these QPs should be solved. QP…
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…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…
Non-prehensile manipulation such as pushing is typically subject to uncertain, non-smooth dynamics. However, modeling the uncertainty of the dynamics typically results in intractable belief dynamics, making data-efficient planning under…
In this paper, we present a real-time whole-body planner for collision-free legged mobile manipulation. We enforce both self-collision and environment-collision avoidance as soft constraints within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme…
To achieve general-purpose dexterous manipulation, robots must rapidly devise and execute contact-rich behaviors. Existing model-based controllers are incapable of globally optimizing in real-time over the exponential number of possible…
This paper proposes a control solution to achieve collision-free platooning control of input-constrained mobile robots. The platooning policy is based on a leader-follower approach where the leader tracks a reference trajectory while…
Physical human-robot collaboration requires strict safety guarantees since robots and humans work in a shared workspace. This letter presents a novel control framework to handle safety-critical position-based constraints for human-robot…
Humanoid robots rely on multi-contact planners to navigate a diverse set of environments, including those that are unstructured and highly constrained. To synthesize stable multi-contact plans within a reasonable time frame, most planners…
A Model Predictive Controller for Tracking is introduced for rendezvous with non-cooperative tumbling targets in active debris removal applications. The target's three-dimensional non-periodic rotational dynamics as well as other state and…
We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…
We present a contact-implicit trajectory optimization framework that can plan contact-interaction trajectories for different robot architectures and tasks using a trivial initial guess and without requiring any parameter tuning. This is…
The transition to agile manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and high-mix-low-volume tasks require robot programming solutions that are flexible. However, most deployed robot solutions are still statically programmed and use stiff position control,…
This study proposes novel control methods that lower impact force by preemptive movement and smoothly transition to conventional contact impedance control. These suggested techniques are for force control-based robots and position/velocity…
Quasi-static models of robotic motion with frictional contact provide a computationally efficient framework for analysis and have been widely used for planning and control of non-prehensile manipulation. In this work, we present a novel…