Related papers: Optimal control of dielectric elastomer actuated m…
In human-robot interactions, eye movements play an important role in non-verbal communication. However, controlling the motions of a robotic eye that display similar performance as the human oculomotor system is still a major challenge. In…
In this paper we study a discrete variational optimal control problem for the rigid body. The cost to be minimized is the external torque applied to move the rigid body from an initial condition to a pre-specified terminal condition.…
Soft dielectric elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field enable applications such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, energy harvesting among others. A key impediment in the use of…
This paper is concerned with the state-constrained optimal control of the three-dimensional thermistor problem, a fully quasilinear coupled system of a parabolic and elliptic PDE with mixed boundary conditions. This system models the…
Existing smart composite piezoelectric beam models in the literature mostly ignore the electro-magnetic interactions and adopt the linear elasticity theory. However, these interactions substantially change the controllability and…
Fast, accurate, and generalizable simulations are a key enabler of modern advances in robot design and control. However, existing simulation frameworks in robotics either model rigid environments and mechanisms only, or if they include…
Autonomous mobile manipulation offers a dual advantage of mobility provided by a mobile platform and dexterity afforded by the manipulator. In this paper, we present a whole-body optimal control framework to jointly solve the problems of…
Soft electronics are a promising and revolutionary alternative for traditional electronics when safe physical interaction between machines and the human body is required. Among various materials architectures developed for producing soft…
We study linear-quadratic stochastic optimal control problems with bilinear state dependence for which the underlying stochastic differential equation (SDE) consists of slow and fast degrees of freedom. We show that, in the same way in…
We study the structure of a simple dynamic optimization problem consisting of one state and one control variable, from a physicist's point of view. By using an analogy to a physical model, we study this system in the classical and quantum…
This paper presents a novel density control framework for multi-robot systems with spatial safety and energy sustainability guarantees. Stochastic robot motion is encoded through the Fokker-Planck Partial Differential Equation (PDE) at the…
Soft robotics is an attractive and rapidly emerging field, in which actuation is coupled with the elastic response of the robot's structure to achieve complex deformation patterns. A crucial challenge is the need for multiple control…
Flexible octopus arms exhibit an exceptional ability to coordinate large numbers of degrees of freedom and perform complex manipulation tasks. As a consequence, these systems continue to attract the attention of biologists and roboticists…
Dynamic simulation of elastic bodies is a longstanding task in engineering and computer graphics. In graphics, numerical integrators like implicit Euler and BDF2 are preferred due to their stability at large time steps, but they tend to…
The present article presents a summarizing view at differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) and analyzes how new application fields and corresponding mathematical models lead to innovations both in theory and in numerical analysis for this…
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
In this paper, we study, from both variational and numerical points of view, a dynamic contact problem between a viscoelastic-viscoplastic piezoelectric body and a deformable obstacle. The contact is modelled using the classical normal…
Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On…
There has been a great deal of recent interest in learning and approximation of functions that can be expressed as expectations of a given nonlinearity with respect to its random internal parameters. Examples of such representations include…
Compression-induced buckling instability of metal thin films on a compliant base result in surface wrinkles. A stiff thin film, perfectly bonded to an infinitely deep pre-stretched dielectric elastomer (DE) substrate, is considered. Linear…