Related papers: Finding and Optimizing Certified, Collision-Free R…
Safe navigation within a workspace is a fundamental skill for autonomous robots to accomplish more complex tasks. Harmonic potentials are artificial potential fields that are analytical, globally convergent and provably free of local…
This paper presents an approach for approximating the reachable space of robotic manipulators based on convex polytopes. The proposed approach predicts the reachable space over a given time horizon based on the robot's actuation limits and…
Industrial manipulators are normally operated in cluttered environments, making safe motion planning important. Furthermore, the presence of model-uncertainties make safe motion planning more difficult. Therefore, in practice the speed is…
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…
Contact-implicit motion planning-embedding contact sequencing as implicit complementarity constraints-holds the promise of leveraging continuous optimization to discover new contact patterns online. Nevertheless, the resulting optimization,…
As mobile robots and autonomous vehicles become increasingly prevalent in human-centred environments, there is a need to control the risk of collision. Perceptual modules, for example machine vision, provide uncertain estimates of object…
Recent progress in contact-rich robotic manipulation has been striking, yet most deployed systems remain confined to simple, scripted routines. One of the key barriers is the lack of motion planning algorithms that can provide verifiable…
In automated manufacturing, robots must reliably assemble parts of various geometries and low tolerances. Ideally, they plan the required motions autonomously. This poses a substantial challenge due to high-dimensional state spaces and…
This paper presents a novel quasi-centralized approach for collision-free path planning of multi-robot systems (MRS) in obstacle-ridden environments. A new formation potential fields (FPF) concept is proposed around a virtual agent, located…
Training-time safety violations have been a major concern when we deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. This paper explores the possibility of safe RL algorithms with zero training-time safety violations in the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of Multi-Robot Path Planning (MRPP) in continuous space. The difficulty of the problem arises from the extremely large search space caused by the combinatorial nature of the problem and the continuous…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
Inverse kinematics (IK) is the problem of finding robot joint configurations that satisfy constraints on the position or pose of one or more end-effectors. For robots with redundant degrees of freedom, there is often an infinite, nonconvex…
Safe motion planning is essential for autonomous vessel operations, especially in challenging spaces such as narrow inland waterways. However, conventional motion planning approaches are often computationally intensive or overly…
In this paper we tackle the problem of persistently covering a complex non-convex environment with a team of robots. We consider scenarios where the coverage quality of the environment deteriorates with time, requiring to constantly revisit…
We present a real-time algorithm that finds the Penetration Depth (PD) between general polygonal models based on iterative and local optimization techniques. Given an in-collision configuration of an object in configuration space, we find…
Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) can improve safety and efficiency for safety-critical applications, but require rigorous testing before deployment. The complexity of these systems often precludes the use of formal verification and…
The generation of energy-efficient and dynamic-aware robot motions that satisfy constraints such as joint limits, self-collisions, and collisions with the environment remains a challenge. In this context, Riemannian geometry offers…
This paper presents a method to compute differentiable collision-free parametric corridors. In contrast to existing solutions that decompose the obstacle-free space into multiple convex sets, the continuous corridors computed by our method…
Real-world environments are inherently uncertain, and to operate safely in these environments robots must be able to plan around this uncertainty. In the context of motion planning, we desire systems that can maintain an acceptable level of…