Related papers: Impact-Aware Multi-Contact Balance Criteria
Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free…
As the availability of cobots increases, it is essential to address the needs of users with little to no programming knowledge to operate such systems efficiently. Programming concepts often use intuitive interaction modalities, such as…
In this paper, we present a real-time whole-body planner for collision-free legged mobile manipulation. We enforce both self-collision and environment-collision avoidance as soft constraints within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme…
Balancing and reacting to strong and unexpected pushes is a critical requirement for humanoid robots. We recently designed a capture point based approach which interfaces with a momentum-based torque controller and we implemented and…
Human-robot co-carrying tasks reveal their potential in both industrial and everyday applications by leveraging the strengths of both parties. Effective control of robots in these tasks requires managing the energy level in the closed-loop…
Grasping has been a long-standing challenge in facilitating the final interface between a robot and the environment. As environments and tasks become complicated, the need to embed higher intelligence to infer from the surroundings and act…
Recently, the centroidal momentum dynamics has received substantial attention to plan dynamically consistent motions for robots with arms and legs in multi-contact scenarios. However, it is also non convex which renders any optimization…
Collaborative manipulation is inherently multimodal, with haptic communication playing a central role. When performed by humans, it involves back-and-forth force exchanges between the participants through which they resolve possible…
Glovebox decommissioning tasks usually require manipulating relatively heavy objects in a highly constrained environment. Thus, contact with the surroundings becomes inevitable. In order to allow the robot to interact with the environment…
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…
Trajectory optimization under uncertainties is a challenging problem for robots in contact with the environment. Such uncertainties are inevitable due to estimation errors, control imperfections, and model mismatches between planning models…
This work presents an extended framework for learning-based bipedal locomotion that incorporates a heuristic step-planning strategy guided by desired torso velocity tracking. The framework enables precise interaction between a humanoid…
This paper presents a novel approach for controlling humanoid robots to push heavy objects. The approach combines kinodynamics-based pose optimization and loco-manipulation model predictive control (MPC). The proposed pose optimization…
Precise and high-fidelity force control is critical for new generations of robots that interact with humans and unknown environments. Mobile robots, such as wearable devices and legged robots, must also be lightweight to accomplish their…
Spatial interaction in 3D environments requires balancing efficiency and precision, which requires dynamic tracking speed adjustments. However, existing techniques often couple tracking speed adjustments directly with hand movements,…
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…
With the aim of further enabling the exploitation of impacts in robotic manipulation, a control framework is presented that directly tackles the challenges posed by tracking control of robotic manipulators that are tasked to perform…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
Planning locomotion trajectories for legged microrobots is challenging because of their complex morphology, high frequency passive dynamics, and discontinuous contact interactions with their environment. Consequently, such research is often…
Recently, a new concept for continuum robots capable of producing macro-scale and micro-scale motion has been presented. These robots achieve their multi-scale motion capabilities by coupling direct-actuation of push-pull back-bones for…