Related papers: Towards Connecting Control to Perception: High-Per…
This paper addresses the autonomous robot navigation problem in a priori unknown n-dimensional environments containing disjoint convex obstacles of arbitrary shapes and sizes, with pairwise distances strictly greater than the robot's…
Ensuring safe and efficient operation of collaborative robots in human environments is challenging, especially in dynamic settings where both obstacle motion and tasks change over time. Current robot controllers typically assume full…
As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…
Humans are remarkable at navigating and moving through dynamic and complex spaces, such as crowded streets. For robots to do the same, it is crucial that they are endowed with highly reactive obstacle avoidance robust to partial and poor…
We develop an autonomous navigation algorithm for a robot operating in two-dimensional environments containing obstacles, with arbitrary non-convex shapes, which can be in close proximity with each other, as long as there exists at least…
In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
Societal-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles requires them to coexist with human drivers, necessitating mutual understanding and coordination among these entities. However, purely real-world or simulation-based experiments cannot be…
The evolution and growing automation of collaborative robots introduce more complexity and unpredictability to systems, highlighting the crucial need for robot's adaptability and flexibility to address the increasing complexities of their…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
Human-robot collaboration requires precise prediction of human motion over extended horizons to enable proactive collision avoidance. Unlike existing planners that rely solely on kinodynamic models, we present a prediction-driven safe…
With robots leaving factories and entering less controlled domains, possibly sharing the space with humans, safety is paramount and multimodal awareness of the body surface and the surrounding environment is fundamental. Taking inspiration…
In this paper, we develop estimation and control methods for quickly reacting to collisions between omnidirectional mobile platforms and their environment. To enable the full-body detection of external forces, we use torque sensors located…
We present a hybrid feedback control framework for autonomous robot navigation in n-dimensional Euclidean spaces cluttered with spherical obstacles. The proposed approach ensures safe and global navigation towards a target location by…
The inherent uncertainty of dynamic environments poses significant challenges for modeling robot behavior, particularly in tasks such as collision avoidance. This paper presents an online controller synthesis framework tailored for robots…
Reactive collision avoidance is essential for agile robots navigating complex and dynamic environments, enabling real-time obstacle response. However, this task is inherently challenging because it requires a tight integration of…
This paper presents a novel approach for collision avoidance in optimal and model predictive control, in which the environment is represented by a large number of points and the robot as a union of padded polygons. The conditions that none…
Online generation of collision free trajectories is of prime importance for autonomous navigation. Dynamic environments, robot motion and sensing uncertainties adds further challenges to collision avoidance systems. This paper presents an…
This work combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with a whole-body controller to enable self-collision avoidance for the MIT Humanoid. Existing reactive controllers for self-collision avoidance cannot guarantee collision-free…
The integration of collaborative robots into industrial environments has improved productivity, but has also highlighted significant challenges related to operator safety and ergonomics. This paper proposes an innovative framework that…
Intentional or unintentional contacts are bound to occur increasingly more often due to the deployment of autonomous systems in human environments. In this paper, we devise methods to computationally predict imminent collisions between…