Related papers: Non-impulsive Contact-Implicit Motion Planning for…

Soft robots require directional control to navigate complex terrains. However, achieving such control often requires multiple actuators, which increases mechanical complexity, complicates control systems, and raises energy consumption.…

Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…

Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where…

Mobile manipulation stands as a core challenge in robotics, enabling robots to assist humans across varied tasks and dynamic daily environments. Conventional mobile manipulation approaches often struggle to generalize across different tasks…

We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact region is a planar non-convex contact patch. Such methods are useful in planning and…

Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are…

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,…

We propose a real-time implementable motion planning framework for cooperative object transportation by nonholonomic mobile manipulator robots (MMRs) in dynamic environments. Our global planner finds a path from start to goal through the…

Deep reinforcement learning produces robust locomotion policies for legged robots over challenging terrains. To date, few studies have leveraged model-based methods to combine these locomotion skills with the precise control of…

Complex dexterous manipulations require switching between prehensile and non-prehensile grasps, and sliding and pivoting the object against the environment. This paper presents a manipulation planner that is able to reason about diverse…

We present a unified framework for multi-task locomotion and manipulation policy learning grounded in a contact-explicit representation. Instead of designing different policies for different tasks, our approach unifies the definition of a…

Classical snake robot control leverages mimicking snake-like gaits tuned for specific environments. However, to operate adaptively in unstructured environments, gait generation must be dynamically scheduled. In this work, we present a…

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…

We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact is assumed to be a planar non-convex contact patch. The planar non-convex contact patch…

Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…

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…

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…

Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…

Designing trajectories for manipulation through contact is challenging as it requires reasoning of object \& robot trajectories as well as complex contact sequences simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel framework for…