Related papers: Force Push: Robust Single-Point Pushing with Force…
In order to be effective partners for humans, robots must become increasingly comfortable with making contact with their environment. Unfortunately, it is hard for robots to distinguish between ``just enough'' and ``too much'' force: some…
This paper studies stabilizer design for position-controlled humanoid robots. Stabilizers are an essential part for position-controlled humanoids, whose primary objective is to adjust the control input sent to the robot to assist the…
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 this paper, we present a principled method to model general planar sliding motion with distributed convex contact patch. The effect of contact patch with indeterminate pressure distribution can be equivalently modeled as the contact…
When legged robots impact their environment, they undergo large changes in their velocities in a small amount of time. Measuring and applying feedback to these velocities is challenging, and is further complicated due to uncertainty in the…
Safe yet stable grasping requires a robotic hand to apply sufficient force on the object to immobilize it while keeping it from getting damaged. Soft robotic hands have been proposed for safe grasping due to their passive compliance, but…
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…
Many robotic path planning problems are continuous, stochastic, and high-dimensional. The ability of a mobile manipulator to coordinate its base and manipulator in order to control its whole-body online is particularly challenging when self…
With the rapid development of Aerial Physical Interaction, the possibility to have aerial robots physically interacting with humans is attracting a growing interest. In one of our previous works, we considered one of the first systems in…
Contact detection for continuum and soft robots has been limited in past works to statics or kinematics-based methods with assumed circular bending curvature or known bending profiles. In this paper, we adapt the generalized momentum…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…
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…
We present a novel method for learning hybrid force/position control from demonstration. We learn a dynamic constraint frame aligned to the direction of desired force using Cartesian Dynamic Movement Primitives. In contrast to approaches…
This paper develops a provably stable sensor-driven controller for path-following applications of robots with unicycle kinematics, one specific class of which is the wheeled mobile robot (WMR). The sensor measurement is converted to a…
In this paper, we design feedback control laws for soft robots modelled using the Cosserat rod, which is spatially discretised using the Piecewise Constant Strain (PCS) approach. The PCS approach transforms the nonlinear PDEs describing the…
An underdeveloped capability in soft robotics is proprioceptive feedback control, where soft actuators can be sensed and controlled using only sensors on the robot's body. Additionally, soft actuators are often unable to support human-scale…
Accurate and robust object state estimation enables successful object manipulation. Visual sensing is widely used to estimate object poses. However, in a cluttered scene or in a tight workspace, the robot's end-effector often occludes the…
Force and proximity sensors are key in robotics, especially when applied in collaborative robots that interact physically or cognitively with humans in real unstructured environments. However, most existing sensors for use in robotics are…
This paper proposes a controller for stable grasping of unknown-shaped objects by two robotic fingers with tactile fingertips. The grasp is stabilised by rolling the fingertips on the contact surface and applying a desired grasping force to…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance…