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Classical rigid-bodied robotic systems are presented with proven success in theoretical development and industrial applications, are recently challenged by the emergence of soft robotics due to a growing need in physical human-robot…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
Fine assembly tasks such as electrical connector insertion have tight tolerances and sensitive components, requiring compensation of alignment errors while applying sufficient force in the insertion direction, ideally at high speeds and…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…
Diagnostic activities, such as ultrasound scans and palpation, are relatively low-cost. They play a crucial role in the early detection of health problems and in assessing their progression. However, they are also error-prone activities,…
As robots move from the laboratory into the real world, motion planning will need to account for model uncertainty and risk. For robot motions involving intermittent contact, planning for uncertainty in contact is especially important, as…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Safe and compliant control of dynamic systems in interaction with the environment, e.g., in shared workspaces, continues to represent a major challenge. Mismatches in the dynamic model of the robots, numerical singularities, and the…
Robots operating alongside people, particularly in sensitive scenarios such as aiding the elderly with daily tasks or collaborating with workers in manufacturing, must guarantee safety and cultivate user trust. Continuum soft manipulators…
Due to their compliant structure, industrial robots without precision-enhancing measures are only to a limited extent suitable for machining applications. Apart from structural, thermal and bearing deformations, the main cause for compliant…
The Industry 4.0 paradigm emphasizes the crucial benefits that collaborative robots, i.e., robots able to work alongside and together with humans, could bring to the whole production process. In this context, an enabling technology yet…
With inspiration from arthropods' exoskeletons, we designed a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can passively damp impact energy. This exoskeleton fuses the protective shell to the main robot…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
The current methods to generate robot actions for automation in significantly different environments have limitations. This paper proposes a new method that matches the impedance of two prerecorded action data with the current environmental…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
We present a computational framework for simulating filaments interacting with rigid bodies through contact. Filaments are challenging to simulate due to their codimensionality, i.e., they are one-dimensional structures embedded in…
In this study, we propose a safety-critical compliant control strategy designed to strictly enforce interaction force constraints during the physical interaction of robots with unknown environments. The interaction force constraint is…
We present a control framework that enables humanoid robots to perform collaborative transportation tasks with a human partner. The framework supports both translational and rotational motions, which are fundamental to co-transport…