Related papers: Loco-Manipulation with Nonimpulsive Contact-Implic…
Snakes can bend their elongate bodies in various forms to traverse various environments. We understand how snakes use lateral bending to push against asperities on flat ground for propulsion, and snake robots can do so effectively. However,…
Manipulating unknown objects in a cluttered environment is difficult because segmentation of the scene into objects, that is, object composition is uncertain. Due to this uncertainty, earlier work has concentrated on either identifying the…
Subterranean burrowing is inherently difficult for robots because of the high forces experienced as well as the high amount of uncertainty in this domain. Because of the difficulty in modeling forces in granular media, we propose the use of…
Combining a vision module inside a closed-loop control system for a \emph{seamless movement} of a robot in a manipulation task is challenging due to the inconsistent update rates between utilized modules. This task is even more difficult in…
Intrinsically elastic robots surpass their rigid counterparts in a range of different characteristics. By temporarily storing potential energy and subsequently converting it to kinetic energy, elastic robots are capable of highly dynamic…
Robotic manipulation involves actions where contacts occur between the robot and the objects. In this scope, the availability of physics-based engines allows motion planners to comprise dynamics between rigid bodies, which is necessary for…
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…
The tremendous success of behavior cloning (BC) in robotic manipulation has been largely confined to tasks where demonstrations can be effectively collected through human teleoperation. However, demonstrations for contact-rich manipulation…
In robotics, contemporary strategies are learning-based, characterized by a complex black-box nature and a lack of interpretability, which may pose challenges in ensuring stability and safety. To address these issues, we propose integrating…
Simplified models are useful to increase the computational efficiency of a motion planning algorithm, but their lack of accuracy have to be managed. We propose two feasibility constraints to be included in a Single Rigid Body Dynamicsbased…
While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…
While motion planning of locomotion for legged robots has shown great success, motion planning for legged robots with dexterous multi-finger grasping is not mature yet. We present an efficient motion planning framework for simultaneously…
Robots are expected to replace menial tasks such as housework. Some of these tasks include nonprehensile manipulation performed without grasping objects. Nonprehensile manipulation is very difficult because it requires considering the…
This paper presents a planning pipeline framework for locomotion in rope-assisted robots climbing vertical surfaces. The proposed framework is formulated as a bi-level optimization scheme that addresses a mixed-integer problem: selecting…
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…
Manipulation planning is the problem of finding a sequence of robot configurations that involves interactions with objects in the scene, e.g., grasping and placing an object, or more general tool-use. To achieve such interactions,…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
This paper proposes a novel active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) method with continuous trajectory optimization over a stochastic robot dynamics model. The problem is formalized as a stochastic optimal control over the…
Contact adaption is an essential capability when manipulating objects. Two key contact modes of non-prehensile manipulation are sticking and sliding. This paper presents a Trajectory Optimization (TO) method formulated as a Mathematical…
The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…