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Simulation-to-real transfer using domain randomization for robot control often relies on low-gear-ratio, backdrivable actuators, but these approaches break down when the sim-to-real gap widens. Inspired by the traditional PID controller, we…

Skid-Steer Wheeled Mobile Robots (SSWMRs) are increasingly being used for off-road autonomy applications. When turning at high speeds, these robots tend to undergo significant skidding and slipping. In this work, using Gaussian Process…

The equations of motion governing mobile robots are dependent on terrain properties such as the coefficient of friction, and contact model parameters. Estimating these properties is thus essential for robotic navigation. Ideally any map…

Providing mobile robots with the ability to manipulate objects has, despite decades of research, remained a challenging problem. The problem is approachable in constrained environments where there is ample prior knowledge of the environment…

Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in…

The reliable fusion of depth maps from multiple viewpoints has become an important problem in many 3D reconstruction pipelines. In this work, we investigate its impact on robotic bin-picking tasks such as 6D object pose estimation. The…

Collaborative robots (cobots) are machines designed to work safely alongside people in human-centric environments. Providing cobots with the ability to quickly infer the inertial parameters of manipulated objects will improve their…

Inaccurate tool localization is one of the main reasons for failures in automating surgical tasks. Imprecise robot kinematics and noisy observations caused by the poor visual acuity of an endoscopic camera make tool tracking challenging.…

A novel hand-eye calibration method for ground-observing mobile robots is proposed. While cameras on mobile robots are common, they are rarely used for ground-observing measurement tasks. Laser trackers are increasingly used in robotics for…

This work presents a motion planning framework for robotic manipulators that computes collision-free paths directly in image space. The generated paths can then be tracked using vision-based control, eliminating the need for an explicit…

Model-based approaches to 3D hand tracking have been shown to perform well in a wide range of scenarios. However, they require initialisation and cannot recover easily from tracking failures that occur due to fast hand motions. Data-driven…

In resource-constrained environments, one can employ spatial multiplexing cameras to acquire a small number of measurements of a scene, and perform effective reconstruction or high-level inference using purely data-driven neural networks.…

Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is…

Planning for legged-wheeled machines is typically done using trajectory optimization because of many degrees of freedom, thus rendering legged-wheeled planners prone to falling prey to bad local minima. We present a combined sampling and…

Parameterizing finger rolling and finger-object contacts in a differentiable manner is important for formulating dexterous manipulation as a trajectory optimization problem. In contrast to previous methods which often assume simplified…

We present an orientation adaptive controller to compensate for the effects of highly constrained environments on continuum manipulator actuation. A transformation matrix updated using optimal estimation techniques from optical flow…

In this work, an existing deep neural network approach for determining a robot's pose from visual information (RGB images) is modified, improving its localization performance without impacting its ease of training. Explicitly, the network's…

Learning visuomotor policies in simulation is much safer and cheaper than in the real world. However, due to discrepancies between the simulated and real data, simulator-trained policies often fail when transferred to real robots. One…

Several robotic frameworks have been recently developed to assist ophthalmic surgeons in performing complex vitreoretinal procedures such as subretinal injection of advanced therapeutics. These surgical robots show promising capabilities;…

Skull base surgery is a demanding field in which surgeons operate in and around the skull while avoiding critical anatomical structures including nerves and vasculature. While image-guided surgical navigation is the prevailing standard,…