Related papers: Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization with Hydr…
Precision is a crucial performance indicator for robot arms, as high precision manipulation allows for a wider range of applications. Traditional methods for improving robot arm precision rely on error compensation. However, these methods…
Robotic manipulation demands precise control over both contact forces and motion trajectories. While force control is essential for achieving compliant interaction and high-frequency adaptation, it is limited to operations in close…
Humanoid robots have great potential for real-world applications due to their ability to operate in environments built for humans, but their deployment is hindered by the challenge of controlling their underlying high-dimensional nonlinear…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential for generalist robotic policies; however, they struggle to generalize to long-horizon complex tasks in novel real-world domains due to distribution shifts and the…
In collaborative human-robot tasks, safety requires not only avoiding collisions but also ensuring safe, intentional physical contact. We present ContactRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that directly incorporates contact…
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…
As robots shift from industrial to human-centered spaces, adopting mobile manipulators, which expand workspace capabilities, becomes crucial. In these settings, seamless interaction with humans necessitates compliant control. Two common…
In this work, we explore how conventional motion planning algorithms can be reapplied to contact-rich manipulation tasks. Rather than focusing solely on efficiency, we investigate how manipulation aspects can be recast in terms of…
We present a low-cost data generation pipeline that integrates physics-based simulation, human demonstrations, and model-based planning to efficiently generate large-scale, high-quality datasets for contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks.…
Legged manipulators, such as quadrupeds equipped with robotic arms, require motion planning techniques that account for their complex kinematic constraints in order to perform manipulation tasks both safely and effectively. However,…
In hybrid force-velocity control, the robot can use velocity control in some directions to follow a trajectory, while performing force control in other directions to maintain contacts with the environment regardless of positional errors. We…
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…
A robot's dynamics -- especially the degree and location of compliance -- can significantly affect performance and control complexity. Passive dynamics can be designed with good regions of attraction or limit cycles for a specific task, but…
We believe that the future of robot motion planning will look very different than how it looks today: instead of complex collision avoidance trajectories with a brittle dependence on sensing and estimation of the environment, motion plans…
While differentiable control has emerged as a powerful paradigm combining model-free flexibility with model-based efficiency, the iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) remains underexplored as a differentiable component. The…
Many contact-rich tasks humans perform, such as box pickup or rolling dough, rely on force feedback for reliable execution. However, this force information, which is readily available in most robot arms, is not commonly used in…
Wheeled-legged robots have the potential for highly agile and versatile locomotion. The combination of legs and wheels might be a solution for any real-world application requiring rapid, and long-distance mobility skills on challenging…
Designing planners and controllers for contact-rich manipulation is extremely challenging as contact violates the smoothness conditions that many gradient-based controller synthesis tools assume. Contact smoothing approximates a non-smooth…
This paper investigates the problem of efficient computation of physically consistent multi-contact behaviors. Recent work showed that under mild assumptions, the problem could be decomposed into simpler kinematic and centroidal dynamic…
This paper proposes a novel approach to performing in-grasp manipulation: the problem of moving an object with reference to the palm from an initial pose to a goal pose without breaking or making contacts. Our method to perform in-grasp…