Related papers: From Compliant to Rigid Contact Simulation: a Unif…
Many robotic path planning problems are continuous, stochastic, and high-dimensional. The ability of a mobile manipulator to coordinate its base and manipulator in order to control its whole-body online is particularly challenging when self…
As dynamical systems equipped with neural network controllers (neural feedback systems) become increasingly prevalent, it is critical to develop methods to ensure their safe operation. Verifying safety requires extending control theoretic…
As robots shift from industrial to human-centered spaces, adopting mobile manipulators, which expand workspace capabilities, becomes crucial. In these settings, seamless interaction with humans necessitates compliant control. Two common…
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design…
Quadruped robots have strong adaptability to extreme environments but may also experience faults. Once these faults occur, robots must be repaired before returning to the task, reducing their practical feasibility. One prevalent concern…
This paper introduces a novel robust closed-form control law to handle time-varying hard and soft constraints in uncertain high-relative-degree nonlinear MIMO systems. These constraints represent spatiotemporal specifications in mechanical…
Mechanical compliance is a key design parameter for dynamic contact-rich manipulation, affecting task success and safety robustness over contact geometry variation. Design of soft robotic structures, such as compliant fingers, requires…
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transportation of an object rigidly grasped by $N$ robotic agents. In particular, we propose a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) scheme that guarantees the navigation of the object to…
Achieving generalized in-hand object rotation remains a significant challenge in robotics, largely due to the difficulty of transferring policies from simulation to the real world. The complex, contact-rich dynamics of dexterous…
We present a general approach for controlling robotic systems that make and break contact with their environments. Contact-implicit model predictive control (CI-MPC) generalizes linear MPC to contact-rich settings by utilizing a bi-level…
Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…
Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…
Linear models for control and motion generation of humanoid robots have received significant attention in the past years, not only due to their well known theoretical guarantees, but also because of practical computational advantages.…
Our goal is to develop an efficient contact detection algorithm for large-scale GPU-based simulation of non-convex objects. Current GPU-based simulators such as IsaacGym and Brax must trade-off speed with fidelity, generality, or both when…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
Mobile manipulator robots operating in complex domestic and industrial environments must effectively coordinate their base and arm motions while avoiding obstacles. While current reactive control methods gracefully achieve this…
Applications of safety, security, and rescue in robotics, such as multi-robot target tracking, involve the execution of information acquisition tasks by teams of mobile robots. However, in failure-prone or adversarial environments, robots…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
Complementarity problems, a class of mathematical optimization problems with orthogonality constraints, are widely used in many robotics tasks, such as locomotion and manipulation, due to their ability to model non-smooth phenomena (e.g.,…
Approximations of optimization problems arise in computational procedures and sensitivity analysis. The resulting effect on solutions can be significant, with even small approximations of components of a problem translating into large…