Related papers: Loco-Manipulation with Nonimpulsive Contact-Implic…
Controlling robots that dynamically engage in contact with their environment is a pressing challenge. Whether a legged robot making-and-breaking contact with a floor, or a manipulator grasping objects, contact is everywhere. Unfortunately,…
Loco-manipulation, physical interaction of various objects that is concurrently coordinated with locomotion, remains a major challenge for legged robots due to the need for both precise end-effector control and robustness to unmodeled…
Micromanipulation systems leverage automation and robotic technologies to improve the precision, repeatability, and efficiency of various tasks at the microscale. However, current approaches are typically limited to specific objects or…
We present a novel method for global motion planning of robotic systems that interact with the environment through contacts. Our method directly handles the hybrid nature of such tasks using tools from convex optimization. We formulate the…
In this theoretical study, we present an analytical framework to investigate the slithering motion of snakes on flat surfaces. While previous studies have predominantly relied on numerical methods to identify optimal locomotion kinematics,…
Loco-manipulation is a key capability for legged robots to perform practical mobile manipulation tasks, such as transporting and pushing objects, in real-world environments. However, learning robust loco-manipulation skills remains…
Rectilinear forms of snake-like robotic locomotion are anticipated to be an advantage in obstacle-strewn scenarios characterizing urban disaster zones, subterranean collapses, and other natural environments. The elongated, laterally-narrow…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
This work presents an optimization-based task and motion planning (TAMP) framework that unifies planning for locomotion and manipulation through a shared representation of contact modes. We define symbolic actions as contact mode changes,…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
Contact is at the core of robotic manipulation. At times, it is desired (e.g. manipulation and grasping), and at times, it is harmful (e.g. when avoiding obstacles). However, traditional path planning algorithms focus solely on…
In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for a snake robot to move straight up a cylindrical surface. Prior works on pole-climbing for a snake robot mainly utilized a rolling helix gait, and although proven to be efficient, it does not…
A cable-driven soft-bodied robot with redundancy can conduct the trajectory tracking task and in the meanwhile fulfill some extra constraints, such as tracking through an end-effector in designated orientation, or get rid of the evitable…
In complex scenarios where typical pick-and-place techniques are insufficient, often non-prehensile manipulation can ensure that a robot is able to fulfill its task. However, non-prehensile manipulation is challenging due to its…
This paper addresses the kinodynamic motion planning for non-holonomic robots in dynamic environments with both static and dynamic obstacles -- a challenging problem that lacks a universal solution yet. One of the promising approaches to…
This paper addresses the problem of pushing manipulation with nonholonomic mobile robots. Pushing is a fundamental skill that enables robots to move unwieldy objects that cannot be grasped. We propose a stable pushing method that maintains…
Dexterous in-hand manipulation is an essential skill of production and life. However, the highly stiff and mutable nature of contacts limits real-time contact detection and inference, degrading the performance of model-based methods.…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…
Nonprehensile actions such as pushing are crucial for addressing multi-object rearrangement problems. Many traditional methods generate robot-centric actions, which differ from intuitive human strategies and are typically inefficient. To…
We consider the problem of cooperative manipulation by a mobile multi-manipulator system operating in obstacle-cluttered and highly constrained environments under spatio-temporal task specifications. The task requires transporting a grasped…