Related papers: Finding Optimal Modular Robots for Aerial Tasks

Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…

This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…

The pattern formation task is commonly seen in a multi-robot system. In this paper, we study the problem of forming complex shapes with functionally limited mobile robots, which have to rely on other robots to precisely locate themselves.…

Enabling vertical take-off and landing while providing the ability to fly long ranges opens the door to a wide range of new real-world aircraft applications while improving many existing tasks. Tiltrotor vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)…

Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to…

In recent years, multimodal locomotion capabilities have enabled robots to maneuver in both terrestrial and aerial domains. However, most of these robots are designed only for locomotion, and few possess the manipulation capabilities…

Multi-robot formation control enables robots to cooperate as a working group in completing complex tasks, which has been widely used in both civilian and military scenarios. Before moving to reach a given formation, each robot should choose…

Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…

We want a multi-robot team to complete complex tasks in minimum time where the locations of task-relevant objects are not known. Effective task completion requires reasoning over long horizons about the likely locations of task-relevant…

This paper studies a class of multi-robot coordination problems where a team of robots aim to reach their goal regions with minimum time and avoid collisions with obstacles and other robots. A novel numerical algorithm is proposed to…

We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…

This paper focuses on the teaming aspects and the role of heterogeneity in a multi-robot system applied to robot-aided urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. We propose a needs-driven multi-robot cooperation mechanism represented through…

This paper explores general multi-robot task and motion planning, where multiple robots in close proximity manipulate objects while satisfying constraints and a given goal. In particular, we formulate the plan refinement problem--which,…

In this letter, we present a novel bi-modal bi-copter robot called Skater, which is adaptable to air and various ground surfaces. Skater consists of a bi-copter moving along its longitudinal direction with two passive wheels on both sides.…

High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…

A software architecture aimed at coordinating a team of heterogeneous aerial vehicles for inspection and maintenance operations in high-voltage power line scenarios is presented in this paper. A hierarchical approach deals with high-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…

A robot simulation system is a basic need for any robotics application. With it, developers' teams of robots can test their algorithms and make initial calibrations without risk of damage to the real robots, assuring safety. However,…

Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…

In this paper, we investigate the adaptive control problem for robot manipulators with both the uncertain kinematics and dynamics. We propose two adaptive control schemes to realize the objective of task-space trajectory tracking…