Related papers: Demonstration-guided Optimal Control for Long-term…
Optimal sampled-data control of a nonlinear system is considered with the stable-manifold approach and extensive use of numerical techniques. The idea is to notice the Hamiltonian system associated with the considered optimal control…
Underactuated robots are characterized by a larger number of degrees of freedom than actuators and if they are designed with a specific mass distribution, they can be controlled by means of differential flatness theory. This structural…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transportation of an object rigidly grasped by $N$ robotic agents. In particular, we propose a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) scheme that guarantees the navigation of the object to…
Mobile manipulators are envisioned to serve more complex roles in people's everyday lives. With recent breakthroughs in large language models, task planners have become better at translating human verbal instructions into a sequence of…
Although manipulation capabilities of aerial robots greatly improved in the last decade, only few works addressed the problem of aerial physical interaction with dynamic environments, proposing strongly model-based approaches. However, in…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
Non-prehensile manipulation methods usually use a simple end effector, e.g., a single rod, to manipulate the object. Compared to the grasping method, such an end effector is compact and flexible, and hence it can perform tasks in a…
Mobile robots are often tasked with repeatedly navigating through an environment whose traversability changes over time. These changes may exhibit some hidden structure, which can be learned. Many studies consider reactive algorithms for…
This work explores the use of topological tools for achieving effective non-prehensile manipulation in cluttered, constrained workspaces. In particular, it proposes the use of persistent homology as a guiding principle in identifying the…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of human-robot coordination in sequences of manipulation tasks. Our approach integrates hierarchical human motion prediction with Task and Motion Planning (TAMP). We first devise a hierarchical motion…
We present an online multi-task learning approach for adaptive nonlinear control, which we call Online Meta-Adaptive Control (OMAC). The goal is to control a nonlinear system subject to adversarial disturbance and unknown…
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…
This paper presents a novel robust trajectory optimization method for constrained nonlinear dynamical systems subject to unknown bounded disturbances. In particular, we seek optimal control policies that remain robustly feasible with…
We present a general approach for controlling robotic systems that make and break contact with their environments. Contact-implicit model predictive control (CI-MPC) generalizes linear MPC to contact-rich settings by utilizing a bi-level…
In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. We model the hybrid nature of a generic multi-limbed mobile…
In this paper, we study the use of state-of-the-art nonlinear system identification techniques for the optimal control of nonlinear systems. We show that the nonlinear systems identification problem is equivalent to estimating the…
The main goal of this paper is developing the method of discrete approximations to derive necessary optimality conditions for a class of constrained sweeping processes with nonsmooth perturbations. Optimal control problems for sweeping…
End-to-end autonomous driving systems powered by Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong performance on common driving scenarios, yet remain brittle in rare but safety-critical long-tail situations such as active construction…
What appears effortless to a human waiter remains a major challenge for robots. Manipulating objects nonprehensilely on a tray is inherently difficult, and the complexity is amplified in dual-arm settings. Such tasks are highly relevant to…