Related papers: A Fully Implicit Method for Robust Frictional Cont…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
This paper presents a novel approach to numerically describe the interactions between rigid bodies, with a special focus on robotic grasping. Some of the more common approaches used to address such issues rely on satisfaction of a set of…
This paper presents and validates active interaction force control and planning for fully actuated and omnidirectional aerial manipulation platforms, with the goal of aerial contact inspection in unstructured environments. We present a…
Long-horizon contact-rich manipulation has long been a challenging problem, as it requires reasoning over both discrete contact modes and continuous object motion. We introduce Implicit Contact Diffuser (ICD), a diffusion-based model that…
Mechanical interactions between rigid rings and flexible cables find broad application in both daily life (hanging clothes) and engineering systems (closing a tether-net). A reduced-order method for the dynamic analysis of sliding rings on…
A method to treat frictional contact problems along embedded surfaces in the finite element framework is developed. Arbitrarily shaped embedded surfaces, cutting through finite element meshes, are handled by the X-FEM. The frictional…
In this paper, we present an approach for generating a variety of whole-body motions for a humanoid robot. We extend the available Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches for walking on flat terrain to plan for both vertical motion of the…
This study presents a whole-body model predictive control (MPC) of robotic systems with rigid contacts, under a given contact sequence using online switching time optimization (STO). We treat robot dynamics with rigid contacts as a switched…
We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact region is a planar non-convex contact patch. Such methods are useful in planning and…
Contact forces introduce discontinuities into robot dynamics that severely limit the use of simulators for gradient-based optimization. Penalty-based simulators such as MuJoCo, soften contact resolution to enable gradient computation.…
The ability of animals to interact with complex dynamics is unmatched in robots. Especially important to the interaction performances is the online adaptation of body dynamics, which can be modeled as an impedance behaviour. However, the…
We propose and analyze an implicit mass-matrix penalization (IMMP) technique which enables efficient and exact sampling of the (Boltzmann/Gibbs) canonical distribution associated to Hamiltonian systems with fast degrees of freedom (fDOFs).…
This work introduces a contact interaction methodology for an unbiased treatment of contacting surfaces without assigning surfaces as master and slave. The contact tractions between interacting discrete segments are evaluated with respect…
We propose a method that simultaneously estimates and controls extrinsic contact with tactile feedback. The method enables challenging manipulation tasks that require controlling light forces and accurate motions in contact, such as…
Efficient and robust trajectories play a crucial role in contact-rich manipulation, which demands accurate mod- eling of object-robot interactions. Many existing approaches rely on point contact models due to their computational effi-…
High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
In this paper, we develop a principled method to model line and surface contact with point contact (we call this point, equivalent contact point) that is consistent with physics-based models of surface (line) contact. Assuming that the set…
The bundling of flagella is known to create a "run" phase, where the bacteria moves in a nearly straight line rather than making changes in direction. Historically, mechanical explanations for the bundling phenomenon intrigued many…
Contact and related phenomena, such as friction, wear or elastohydrodynamic lubrication, remain as one of the most challenging problem classes in nonlinear solid and structural mechanics. In the context of their computational treatment with…