Related papers: Quasistatic contact-rich manipulation via linear c…
Dexterous multi-fingered hands can provide robots with the ability to flexibly perform a wide range of manipulation skills. However, many of the more complex behaviors are also notoriously difficult to control: Performing in-hand object…
Mobile manipulators typically encounter significant challenges in navigating narrow, cluttered environments due to their high-dimensional state spaces and complex kinematics. While reactive methods excel in dynamic settings, they struggle…
Controlling robots that dynamically engage in contact with their environment is a pressing challenge. Whether a legged robot making-and-breaking contact with a floor, or a manipulator grasping objects, contact is everywhere. Unfortunately,…
Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…
Active Queue Management (AQM) for mitigating Internet congestion has been addressed via various feedback control syntheses, especially P, PI, and PID regulators, by using a linear approximation where the ``round trip time'', i.e., the…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
Modern, torque-controlled service robots can regulate contact forces when interacting with their environment. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful method to solve the underlying control problem, allowing to plan for whole-body…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
Smoothed implicit contact dynamics enables gradient-based planning and control for contact-rich tasks without predefined mode sequences. However, safety-critical control remains challenging because implicit contact dynamics makes…
A standard motion control with feedback of the output displacement cannot handle unforeseen contact with environment without penetrating into the soft, i.e. viscoelastic, materials or even damaging the fragile materials. Robotics and…
Sample-efficiency and reliability remain major bottlenecks toward wide adoption of reinforcement learning algorithms in continuous settings with high-dimensional perceptual inputs. Toward addressing these challenges, we introduce a new…
Lane changing and lane merging remains a challenging task for autonomous driving, due to the strong interaction between the controlled vehicle and the uncertain behavior of the surrounding traffic participants. The interaction induces a…
This paper aims to develop a hierarchical nonlinear control algorithm, based on model predictive control (MPC), quadratic programming (QP), and virtual constraints, to generate and stabilize locomotion patterns in a real-time manner for…
The purpose of this paper is to study and design direct and indirect couplings for use in coherent feedback control of a class of linear quantum stochastic systems. A general physical model for a nominal linear quantum system coupled…
Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…
The Sequential Linear Quadratic (SLQ) algorithm is a continuous-time variant of the well-known Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) technique with a Gauss-Newton Hessian approximation. This family of methods has gained popularity in the…
Most animal and human locomotion behaviors for solving complex tasks involve dynamic motions and rich contact interaction. In fact, complex maneuvers need to consider dynamic movement and contact events at the same time. We present a…
Reinforcement Learning algorithms have recently been proposed to learn time-sequential control policies in the field of autonomous driving. Direct applications of Reinforcement Learning algorithms with discrete action space will yield…
Learning from real-world robot demonstrations holds promise for interacting with complex real-world environments. However, the complexity and variability of interaction dynamics often cause purely positional controllers to struggle with…
Humans interact with an object in many different ways by making contact at different locations, creating a highly complex motion space that can be difficult to learn, particularly when synthesizing such human interactions in a controllable…