Related papers: Allowing Safe Contact in Robotic Goal-Reaching: Pl…

In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…

Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…

Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…

Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively…

Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free…

Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…

We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…

Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…

As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…

In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…

Multi-robot collaboration for target tracking in adversarial environments poses significant challenges, including system failures, dynamic priority shifts, and other unpredictable factors. These challenges become even more pronounced when…

Human-robot collaboration aims to extend human ability through cooperation with robots. This technology is currently helping people with physical disabilities, has transformed the manufacturing process of companies, improved surgical…

In recent years, the focus on developing robot manipulators has shifted towards prioritizing safety in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Impedance control is a typical approach for interaction control in collaboration tasks. However, such a…

Humanoid robots rely on multi-contact planners to navigate a diverse set of environments, including those that are unstructured and highly constrained. To synthesize stable multi-contact plans within a reasonable time frame, most planners…

Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents…

In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…

Modern industry still relies on manual manufacturing operations and safe human-robot interaction is of great interest nowadays. Speed and Separation Monitoring (SSM) allows close and efficient collaborative scenarios by maintaining a…

Robotic tasks involving contact interactions pose significant challenges for trajectory optimization due to discontinuous dynamics. Conventional formulations typically assume deterministic contact events, which limit robustness and…

Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…