Related papers: Embracing Safe Contacts with Contact-aware Plannin…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
In collaborative human-robot tasks, safety requires not only avoiding collisions but also ensuring safe, intentional physical contact. We present ContactRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework that directly incorporates contact…
We believe that the future of robot motion planning will look very different than how it looks today: instead of complex collision avoidance trajectories with a brittle dependence on sensing and estimation of the environment, motion plans…
In this paper, we present a framework that unites obstacle avoidance and deliberate physical interaction for robotic manipulators. As humans and robots begin to coexist in work and household environments, pure collision avoidance is…
Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…
In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…
Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…
To achieve general-purpose dexterous manipulation, robots must rapidly devise and execute contact-rich behaviors. Existing model-based controllers are incapable of globally optimizing in real-time over the exponential number of possible…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
This paper considers a scenario where a robot and a human operator share the same workspace, and the robot is able to both carry out autonomous tasks and physically interact with the human in order to achieve common goals. In this context,…
Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…
Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…
In this paper, the problem of making a safe compliant contact between a human and an assistive robot is considered. Users with disabilities have a need to utilize their assistive robots for physical human-robot interaction (PHRI) during…
This letter presents contact-safe Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) for robot applications that achieves contact-safe behaviors in the learning process. In typical MBRL, we cannot expect the data-driven model to generate accurate…
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.…
We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…
We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…
Controlling fine-grained forces during manipulation remains a core challenge in robotics. While robot policies learned from robot-collected data or simulation show promise, they struggle to generalize across the diverse range of real-world…
In this paper we introduce a novel approach that enables users to interact with a mobile robot in a natural manner. The proposed interaction system does not require any specific infrastructure or device, but relies on commonly utilized…