Related papers: Force Push: Robust Single-Point Pushing with Force…
In this paper, we present a hybrid position/force controller for operating joint robots. The hybrid controller has two goals -- motion tracking and force regulating. As long as these two goals are not mutually exclusive, they can be…
Fluid-based soft actuators are an attractive option for lightweight and human-safe robots. These actuators, combined with fluid pressure force feedback, are in principle a form of series-elastic actuation (SEA), in which nearly all…
In this work, we consider a group of robots working together to manipulate a rigid object to track a desired trajectory in $SE(3)$. The robots do not know the mass or friction properties of the object, or where they are attached to the…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
This work proposes a control law for a manipulator with the aim of realizing desired time-varying motion-force profiles in the presence of a stiff environment. In many cases, the interaction with the environment affects only one degree of…
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…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…
Non-prehensile pushing to move and reorient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In the real world, the object's physical properties and friction with the floor contain significant uncertainties, which makes the task…
In this paper, an adaptive nonlinear strategy for the motion and force control of flexible manipulators is proposed. The approach provides robust motion control until contact is detected when force control is then available--without any…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades but is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance guarantees -…
Nonlinear controllers for floating base systems in contact with the environment are often framed as quadratic programming (QP) optimization problems. Common drawbacks of such QP based controllers are: the control input often experiences…
Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…
Grasping compliant objects is difficult for robots - applying too little force may cause the grasp to fail, while too much force may lead to object damage. A robot needs to apply the right amount of force to quickly and confidently grasp…
This paper proposes a coordinate-free controller to drive a mobile robot to encircle a target at unknown position by only using range measurements. Different from the existing works, a backstepping based controller is proposed to encircle…
In this letter, we propose a whole-body control strategy for humanoid robots in multi-contact settings that enables switching between fixed and sliding contacts under active balance. We compute, in real-time, a safe center-of-mass position…
Non-prehensile manipulation, such as pushing objects to a desired target position, is an important skill for robots to assist humans in everyday situations. However, the task is challenging due to the large variety of objects with different…
Multi-robot formation control has various applications in domains such as vehicle troops, platoons, payload transportation, and surveillance. Maintaining formation in a vehicle platoon requires designing a suitable control scheme that can…
For mobile robots, navigating cluttered or dynamic environments often necessitates non-prehensile manipulation, particularly when faced with objects that are too large, irregular, or fragile to grasp. The unpredictable behavior and varying…
We propose a hybrid feedback control strategy that safely steers a point-mass robot to a target location optimally from all initial conditions in the n-dimensional Euclidean space with a single spherical obstacle. The robot moves straight…
In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of piecewise affine feedback controllers to address the problem of safe and robust controller design in robotics based on high-level controls specifications. The methodology is based on…