Related papers: Smoothly Connected Preemptive Impact Reduction and…
Soft electronic skins are one of the means to turn an industrial manipulator into a collaborative robot. For manipulators that are already fit for physical human-robot collaboration, soft skins can make them safer. In this work, we study…
This paper presents a novel control approach to dealing with object slip during robotic manipulative movements. Slip is a major cause of failure in many robotic grasping and manipulation tasks. Existing works increase grip force to…
Communication and cooperation among team members can be enhanced significantly with physical interaction. Successful collaboration requires the integration of the individual partners' intentions into a shared action plan, which may involve…
Electromechanical switching devices, such as solenoid valves, contactors, and relays, suffer from undesirable phenomena like clicking, mechanical wear, and contact bounce. Despite that, they are still widely used in industry due to their…
Dexterous in-hand manipulation is an essential skill of production and life. However, the highly stiff and mutable nature of contacts limits real-time contact detection and inference, degrading the performance of model-based methods.…
In this paper, we address the challenge of performing non-prehensile pushing operations with a compliant robotic manipulation system. To ensure safe operations in human-populated environments, robots must comply with external physical…
Medical robotics can help improve and extend the reach of healthcare services. A major challenge for medical robots is the complex physical interaction between the robot and the patients which is required to be safe. This work presents the…
Humanoid robots are expected to operate in human-centered environments where safe and natural physical interaction is essential. However, most recent reinforcement learning (RL) policies emphasize rigid tracking and suppress external…
This paper presents design and control innovations of wearable robots that tackle two barriers to widespread adoption of powered exoskeletons, namely restriction of human movement and versatile control of wearable co-robot systems. First,…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
Contact estimation is a key ability for limbed robots, where making and breaking contacts has a direct impact on state estimation and balance control. Existing approaches typically rely on gate-cycle priors or designated contact sensors. We…
Force and proximity sensors are key in robotics, especially when applied in collaborative robots that interact physically or cognitively with humans in real unstructured environments. However, most existing sensors for use in robotics are…
When balancing, a humanoid robot can be easily subjected to unexpected disturbances like external pushes. In these circumstances, reactive movements as steps become a necessary requirement in order to avoid potentially harmful falling…
A robot making contact with an environment or human presents potential safety risks, including excessive collision force. While experiments on the effect of robot inertia, relative velocity, and interface stiffness on collision are in…
Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot…
Contact-rich manipulation is crucial for robots to perform tasks requiring precise force control, such as insertion, assembly, and in-hand manipulation. However, most imitation learning (IL) policies remain position-centric and lack…
Robots have been brought to work close to humans in many scenarios. For coexistence and collaboration, robots should be safe and pleasant for humans to interact with. To this end, the robots could be both physically soft with multimodal…
Adapting upper-limb impedance (i.e., stiffness, damping, inertia) is essential for humans interacting with dynamic environments for executing grasping or manipulation tasks. On the other hand, control methods designed for state-of-the-art…
Modeling contact between deformable solids is a fundamental problem in computer animation, mechanical design, and robotics. Existing methods based on $C^0$-discretizations -- piece-wise linear or polynomial surfaces -- suffer from…
This article reviews contemporary methods for integrating force, including both proprioception and tactile sensing, in robot manipulation policy learning. We conduct a comparative analysis on various approaches for sensing force, data…