Related papers: Embracing Safe Contacts with Contact-aware Plannin…
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…
The ultrasound scanning robot operates in environments where frequent human-robot interactions occur. Most existing control methods for ultrasound scanning address only one specific interaction situation or implement hard switches between…
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a…
This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to…
Robot interaction control is often limited to low dynamics or low flexibility, depending on whether an active or passive approach is chosen. In this work, we introduce a hybrid control scheme that combines the advantages of active and…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…
Robots often face manipulation tasks in environments where vision is inadequate due to clutter, occlusions, or poor lighting--for example, reaching a shutoff valve at the back of a sink cabinet or locating a light switch above a crowded…
Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
Collaborative robots are expected to be able to work alongside humans and in some cases directly replace existing human workers, thus effectively responding to rapid assembly line changes. Current methods for programming contact-rich tasks,…
We present a unified framework for multi-task locomotion and manipulation policy learning grounded in a contact-explicit representation. Instead of designing different policies for different tasks, our approach unifies the definition of a…
Grasping objects under uncertainty remains an open problem in robotics research. This uncertainty is often due to noisy or partial observations of the object pose or shape. To enable a robot to react appropriately to unforeseen effects, it…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
Autonomous robots are projected to significantly augment the manual workforce, especially in repetitive and hazardous tasks. For a successful deployment of such robots in human environments, it is crucial to guarantee human safety.…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
Mobile robots are traditionally developed to be reactive and avoid collisions with surrounding humans, often moving in unnatural ways without following social protocols, forcing people to behave very differently from human-human interaction…
The topic of physical human-robot interaction received a lot of attention from the robotics community because of many promising application domains. However, studying physical interaction between a robot and an external agent, like a human…
If we consider human manipulation, it is clear that contact-rich manipulation (CRM)-the ability to use any surface of the manipulator to make contact with objects-can be far more efficient and natural than relying solely on end-effectors…
Human awareness in robot motion planning is crucial for seamless interaction with humans. Many existing techniques slow down, stop, or change the robot's trajectory locally to avoid collisions with humans. Although using the information on…
Jointly achieving safety and efficiency in human-robot interaction (HRI) settings is a challenging problem, as the robot's planning objectives may be at odds with the human's own intent and expectations. Recent approaches ensure safe robot…