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Collaborative space robots are an emerging technology with high impact as robots facilitate servicing functions in collaboration with astronauts with higher precision during lengthy tasks, under tight operational schedules, with less risk…
Real-world object manipulation has been commonly challenged by physical uncertainties and perception limitations. Being an effective strategy, while caging configuration-based manipulation frameworks have successfully provided robust…
Behavior Trees constitute a widespread AI tool which has been successfully spun out in robotics. Their advantages include simplicity, modularity, and reusability of code. However, Behavior Trees remain a high-level decision making engine;…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Agricultural robotics and automation are facing some challenges rooted in the high variability 9 of products, task complexity, crop quality requirement, and dense vegetation. Such a set of 10 challenges demands a more versatile and safe…
Manipulation planning and control are relevant building blocks of a robotic system and their tight integration is a key factor to improve robot autonomy and allows robots to perform manipulation tasks of increasing complexity, such as those…
Wheeled-legged robots, which have wheels at their feet and achieve high mobility by coordinating wheel drive and leg drive, have been developed. These robots have been developed purely as platforms specialized for locomotion. Therefore,…
Legged robots with advanced manipulation capabilities have the potential to significantly improve household duties and urban maintenance. Despite considerable progress in developing robust locomotion and precise manipulation methods,…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Transfer of objects between humans and robots is a critical capability for collaborative robots. Although there has been a recent surge of interest in human-robot handovers, most prior research focus on robot-to-human handovers. Further,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in many robotic applications, but it requires extensive exploration of the state-action space, during which behaviors can be unsafe. This significantly limits its applicability to large robots with…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
HapticBots introduces a novel encountered-type haptic approach for Virtual Reality (VR) based on multiple tabletop-size shape-changing robots. These robots move on a tabletop and change their height and orientation to haptically render…
This paper addresses two intertwined needs for collaborative robots operating in shop-floor environments. The first is the ability to perform complex manipulation operations, such as those on articulated or even flexible objects, in a way…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful…
Assistive robots have growing potential to support physical wellbeing in home and healthcare settings, for example, by guiding users through stretching or rehabilitation routines. However, existing systems remain largely scripted, which…
Robots are becoming a vital ingredient in society. Some of their daily tasks require dual-arm manipulation skills in the rapidly changing, dynamic and unpredictable real-world environments where they have to operate. Given the expertise of…
Recent research efforts have yielded significant advancements in manipulating objects under homogeneous settings where the robot is required to either manipulate rigid or deformable (soft) objects. However, the manipulation under…