Related papers: Reconfigurable Robot Control Using Flexible Coupli…
In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…
Collaborative robots and space manipulators contain significant joint flexibility. It complicates the control design, compromises the control bandwidth, and limits the tracking accuracy. The imprecise knowledge of the flexible joint…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
The control problem of a multi-copter swarm, mechanically coupled through a modular lattice structure of connecting rods, is considered in this article. The system's structural elasticity is considered in deriving the system's dynamics. The…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
Soft robots have drawn significant attention recently for their ability to achieve rich shapes when interacting with complex environments. However, their elasticity and flexibility compared to rigid robots also pose significant challenges…
This work introduces a formulation of model predictive control (MPC) which adaptively reasons about the complexity of the model based on the task while maintaining feasibility and stability guarantees. Existing MPC implementations often…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments.…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…
Robot swarms have been shown to improve the ability of individual robots by inter-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present the PuzzleBots - a low-cost robotic swarm system where robots can physically couple with each other to form…
Multi-robot teams can achieve more dexterous, complex and heavier payload tasks than a single robot, yet effective collaboration is required. Multi-robot collaboration is extremely challenging due to the different kinematic and dynamics…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) consist of multiple drone units that can self-reconfigure to adapt to various mission requirements and fault conditions. However, existing fault-tolerant control methods exhibit significant oscillations…
The physical coupling between robots has the potential to improve the capabilities of multi-robot systems in challenging manufacturing processes. However, the path tracking accuracy of physically coupled robots is not studied adequately,…