Related papers: Simultaneous Trajectory Optimization and Contact S…
Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both…
This thesis presents novel algorithms to advance robotic object rearrangement, a critical task for autonomous systems in applications like warehouse automation and household assistance. Addressing challenges of high-dimensional planning,…
Efficient navigation in unknown and dynamic environments is crucial for expanding the application domain of mobile robots. The core challenge stems from the nonavailability of a feasible global path for guiding optimization-based local…
Automation applications are pushing the deployment of many high DoF manipulators in warehouse and manufacturing environments. This has motivated many efforts on optimizing manipulation tasks involving a single arm. Coordinating multiple…
Trajectories are optimized for a two-dimensional simplified skateboarding system to allow it to perform a fundamental skateboarding trick called an "ollie". A methodology for generating trick trajectories by controlling the position of a…
Robotic manipulation in dynamic environments often requires seamless transitions between different grasp types to maintain stability and efficiency. However, achieving smooth and adaptive grasp transitions remains a challenge, particularly…
Planning long duration robotic manipulation sequences is challenging because of the complexity of exploring feasible trajectories through nonlinear contact dynamics and many contact modes. Moreover, this complexity grows with the problem's…
This paper presents a reactive controller for planar manipulation tasks that leverages machine learning to achieve real-time performance. The approach is based on a Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulation, where the goal is to find an…
During complex object manipulation, manipulator systems often face the configuration disconnectivity problem due to closed-chain constraints. Although regrasping can be adopted to get a piecewise connected manipulation, it is a challenging…
The travelling salesman problem (TSP) of space trajectory design is complicated by its complex structure design space. The graph based tree search and stochastic seeding combinatorial approaches are commonly employed to tackle the…
Trajectory optimization (TO) is an efficient tool to generate a redundant manipulator's joint trajectory following a 6-dimensional Cartesian path. The optimization performance largely depends on the quality of initial trajectories. However,…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…
We present an algorithm that produces a plan for relocating obstacles in order to grasp a target in clutter by a robotic manipulator without collisions. We consider configurations where objects are densely populated in a constrained and…
Navigating in search and rescue environments is challenging, since a variety of terrains has to be considered. Hybrid driving-stepping locomotion, as provided by our robot Momaro, is a promising approach. Similar to other locomotion…
Contact-implicit trajectory optimization (CITO) enables the automatic discovery of contact sequences, but most methods rely on fine time discretization to capture all contact events accurately, which increases problem size and runtime while…
Autonomous high-speed navigation through large, complex environments requires real-time generation of agile trajectories that are dynamically feasible, collision-free, and satisfy constraints. Most modern trajectory planning techniques rely…
Autonomous multi-finger grasping is a fundamental capability in robotic manipulation. Optimization-based approaches show strong performance, but tend to be sensitive to initialization and are potentially time-consuming. As an alternative,…
This work addresses the challenge of a robot using real-time feedback from contact sensors to reliably manipulate a movable object on a cluttered tabletop. We formulate contact manipulation as a partially observable Markov decision process…
Real-time computation of optimal control is a challenging problem and, to solve this difficulty, many frameworks proposed to use learning techniques to learn (possibly sub-optimal) controllers and enable their usage in an online fashion.…
Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…