Related papers: Robust Control of a Multi-Axis Shape Memory Alloy-…
Growing demands in the semiconductor industry necessitate increasingly stringent requirements on throughput and positioning accuracy of lithographic equipment. Meeting these demands involves employing highly aggressive motion profiles,…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Soft robots can execute tasks with safer interactions. However, control techniques that can effectively exploit the systems' capabilities are still missing. Differential dynamic programming (DDP) has emerged as a promising tool for…
This paper describes the control, and evaluation of a new human-scaled biped robot with liquid cooled viscoelastic actuators (VLCA). Based on the lessons learned from previous work from our team on VLCA [1], we present a new system design…
In this work, we present a multimodal system for active robot-object interaction using laser-based SLAM, RGBD images, and contact sensors. In the object manipulation task, the robot adjusts its initial pose with respect to obstacles and…
This paper presents the analytic modeling of mobile heavy-duty manipulators with actively articulated suspension and its optimal control to maximize its static and dynamic stabilization. By adopting the screw theory formalism, we consider…
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a…
Fast feedback control and safety guarantees are essential in modern robotics. We present an approach that achieves both by combining novel robust model predictive control (MPC) with function approximation via (deep) neural networks (NNs).…
The motion control of wheeled mobile robots at high speeds under adverse ground conditions is a difficult task, since the robots' wheels may be subject to different kinds of slip. This work introduces an adaptive kinematic controller that…
Vehicle roll control has been a well studied problem. One of the ubiquitous methods to mitigate vehicle rollover in the automobile industry is via a mechanical anti-roll bar. However with the advent of electric vehicles, rollover mitigation…
Multi-robot formation control has various applications in domains such as vehicle troops, platoons, payload transportation, and surveillance. Maintaining formation in a vehicle platoon requires designing a suitable control scheme that can…
Heavy-duty operations, typically performed using heavy-duty hydraulic manipulators (HHMs), are susceptible to environmental contact due to tracking errors or sudden environmental changes. Therefore, beyond precise control design, it is…
We present the design and implementation of a taskable reactive mobile manipulation system. In contrary to related work, we treat the arm and base degrees of freedom as a holistic structure which greatly improves the speed and fluidity of…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
Neglecting complex aerodynamic effects hinders high-speed yet high-precision multirotor autonomy. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient learning-based model predictive controller that simultaneously optimizes a trajectory…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
Modern non-linear model-based controllers require an accurate physics model and model parameters to be able to control mobile robots at their limits. Also, due to surface slipping at high speeds, the friction parameters may continually…