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Related papers: Optimal Control for Articulated Soft Robots

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Trajectory following is one of the complicated control problems when its dynamics are nonlinear, stochastic and include a large number of parameters. The problem has significant difficulties including a large number of trials required for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-14 Ali Lenjani

Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-01 Renjie Ma , Ziyao Qu , Zhijian Hu , Dong Zhao , Marios M. Polycarpou

Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is a popular technique used to generate motion for dynamic-legged robots in the recent past. However, in most cases, only the first-order partial derivatives of the underlying dynamics are used,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Shubham Singh , Ryan P. Russell , Patrick M. Wensing

Certified safe control is a growing challenge in robotics, especially when performance and safety objectives must be concurrently achieved. In this work, we extend the barrier state (BaS) concept, recently proposed for safe stabilization of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Hassan Almubarak , Kyle Stachowicz , Nader Sadegh , Evangelos A. Theodorou

The paper develops the Adaptive Dynamic Programming Toolbox (ADPT), which solves optimal control problems for continuous-time nonlinear systems. Based on the adaptive dynamic programming technique, the ADPT computes optimal feedback…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-01 Xiaowei Xing , Dong Eui Chang

This letter presents a method to reduce the computational demands of including second-order dynamics sensitivity information into the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) trajectory optimization algorithm. An approach to DDP is developed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-01 John N. Nganga , Patrick M. Wensing

This paper presents a distributed inverse dynamics controller (DIDC) for quadruped robots that addresses the limitations of existing reactive controllers: simplified dynamical models, the inability to handle exact friction cone constraints,…

Indirect trajectory optimization methods such as Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) have found considerable success when only planning under dynamic feasibility constraints. Meanwhile, nonlinear programming (NLP) has been the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-06 Sumeet Singh , Jean-Jacques Slotine , Vikas Sindhwani

Distributed model predictive control (DMPC) is a flexible and scalable feedback control method applicable to a wide range of systems. While the stability analysis of DMPC is quite well understood, there exist only limited implementation…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-05 Gösta Stomberg , Henrik Ebel , Timm Faulwasser , Peter Eberhard

Many robotic systems are underactuated, meaning not all degrees of freedom can be directly controlled due to lack of actuators, input constraints, or state-dependent actuation. This property, compounded by modeling uncertainties and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Daniel M. Cherenson , Dimitra Panagou

We introduce a novel method for handling endpoint constraints in constrained differential dynamic programming (DDP). Unlike existing approaches, our method guarantees quadratic convergence and is exact, effectively managing rank…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-07 Maria Parilli , Sergi Martinez , Carlos Mastalli

In this paper, a novel adaptive optimal control strategy is proposed to achieve the cooperative optimal output regulation of continuous-time linear multi-agent systems based on adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). The proposed method is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-01-18 Omar Qasem , Khalid Jebari , Weinan Gao

Finite element methods have been successfully used to develop physics-based models of soft robots that capture the nonlinear dynamic behavior induced by continuous deformation. These high-fidelity models are therefore ideal for designing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Sander Tonkens , Joseph Lorenzetti , Marco Pavone

We introduce Crocoddyl (Contact RObot COntrol by Differential DYnamic Library), an open-source framework tailored for efficient multi-contact optimal control. Crocoddyl efficiently computes the state trajectory and the control policy for a…

We propose a planning and control approach to physics-based manipulation. The key feature of the algorithm is that it can adapt to the accuracy requirements of a task, by slowing down and generating `careful' motion when the task requires…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Wisdom C. Agboh , Mehmet R. Dogar

Soft and soft-rigid hybrid robots are inherently underactuated and operate under tight actuator limits, making task-space control with stability guarantees challenging. Common nonlinear strategies for soft robots (e.g., those based on PD…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Huy Pham , Zach J. Patterson

This paper addresses the problem of learning the optimal control policy for a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system with continuous state space, continuous action space and unknown dynamics. This class of problems are typically addressed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Ran Wang , Karthikeya Parunandi , Dan Yu , Dileep Kalathil , Suman Chakravorty

We present a novel reinforcement learning method to train the quadruped robot in a simulated environment. The idea of controlling quadruped robots in a dynamic environment is quite challenging and my method presents the optimum policy and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nabeel Ahmad Khan Jadoon , Mongkol Ekpanyapong

Trajectory optimization is an efficient approach for solving optimal control problems for complex robotic systems. It relies on two key components: first the transcription into a sparse nonlinear program, and second the corresponding solver…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Wilson Jallet , Antoine Bambade , Nicolas Mansard , Justin Carpentier

Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Yitong Deng , Yaorui Zhang , Xingzhe He , Shuqi Yang , Yunjin Tong , Michael Zhang , Daniel DiPietro , Bo Zhu