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Mobile manipulators require coordinated control between navigation and manipulation to accomplish tasks. Typically, coordinated mobile manipulation behaviors have base navigation to approach the goal followed by arm manipulation to reach…

Collaborative manipulation task often requires negotiation using explicit or implicit communication. An important example is determining where to move when the goal destination is not uniquely specified, and who should lead the motion. This…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

Designing robotic assistance devices for manipulation tasks is challenging. This work is concerned with improving accuracy and usability of semi-autonomous robots, such as human operated manipulators or exoskeletons. The key insight is to…

Integrating the heterogeneous controllers of a complex mechanical system, such as a mobile manipulator, within the same structure and in a modular way is still challenging. In this work we extend our framework based on Behavior Trees for…

Safe and compliant control of dynamic systems in interaction with the environment, e.g., in shared workspaces, continues to represent a major challenge. Mismatches in the dynamic model of the robots, numerical singularities, and the…

Recent trends in robot arm control have seen a shift towards end-to-end solutions, using deep reinforcement learning to learn a controller directly from raw sensor data, rather than relying on a hand-crafted, modular pipeline. However, the…

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…

Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…

This work aims to learn how to perform complex robot manipulation tasks that are composed of several, consecutively executed low-level sub-tasks, given as input a few visual demonstrations of the tasks performed by a person. The sub-tasks…

This paper presents a -- Learning from Demonstration -- method to perform robot movement trajectories that can be defined as you go. This way unstructured tasks can be performed, without the need to know exactly all the tasks and start and…

Grasping in dynamic environments presents a unique set of challenges. A stable and reachable grasp can become unreachable and unstable as the target object moves, motion planning needs to be adaptive and in real time, the delay in…

In teleoperation, research has mainly focused on target approaching, where we deal with the more challenging object manipulation task by advancing the shared control technique. Appropriately manipulating an object is challenging due to the…

The advent of tactile sensors in robotics has sparked many ideas on how robots can leverage direct contact measurements of their environment interactions to improve manipulation tasks. An important line of research in this regard is that of…

This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…

Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labour shortages in factories, assist elderly at homes, and colonize new planets. While classical controllers for humanoid robots have…

To perform tasks well in a new domain, one must first know something about it. This paper reports on a robot controller for navigation through unfamiliar indoor worlds. Based on spatial affordances, it integrates planning with reactive…

Soft robotics hold promise in the development of safe yet powered assistive wearable devices for infants. Key to this is the development of closed-loop controllers that can help regulate pneumatic pressure in the device's actuators in an…

Field-based reactive control provides a minimalist, decentralized route to guiding robots that lack onboard computation. Such schemes are well suited to resource-limited machines like microrobots, yet implementation artifacts, limited…

Trajectory generation in confined environment is crucial for wide adoption of intelligent robot manipulators. In this paper, we propose a novel motion planning approach for redundant robot arms that uses a hybrid optimization framework to…