Related papers: A Thesis on Loco-Manipulation with Non-impulsive C…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Contact-rich problems, such as snake robot locomotion, offer unexplored yet rich opportunities for optimization-based trajectory and acyclic contact planning. So far, a substantial body of control research has focused on emulating snake…
This paper presents the development and integration of a vision-guided loco-manipulation pipeline for Northeastern University's snake robot, COBRA. The system leverages a YOLOv8-based object detection model and depth data from an onboard…
Snake robots offer exceptional mobility across extreme terrain inaccessible to conventional rovers, yet their highly articulated bodies present fundamental challenges for autonomous navigation in environments lacking external tracking…
Passive tumbling uses natural forces like gravity for efficient travel. But without an active means of control, passive tumblers must rely entirely on external forces. Northeastern University's COBRA is a snake robot that can morph into a…
Navigating rugged terrain and steep slopes is a challenge for mobile robots. Conventional legged and wheeled systems struggle with these environments due to limited traction and stability. Northeastern University's COBRA (Crater Observing…
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
Studying snake robot locomotion in a cluttered environment has been a complicated task because the motion model is discontinuous due to the physical contact with obstacles, and the contact force cannot be determined solely by contact…
Recent studies on quadruped robots have focused on either locomotion or mobile manipulation using a robotic arm. Legged robots can manipulate heavier and larger objects using non-prehensile manipulation primitives, such as planar pushing,…
This work employs a reinforcement learning-based model identification method aimed at enhancing the accuracy of the dynamics for our snake robot, called COBRA. Leveraging gradient information and iterative optimization, the proposed…
We examine the problem of snake-like locomotion by studying a system consisting of a planar inextensible elastic rod that is able to control its spontaneous curvature. Using a Cosserat model we derive, through variational principles, the…
We present a contact-implicit trajectory optimization framework that can plan contact-interaction trajectories for different robot architectures and tasks using a trivial initial guess and without requiring any parameter tuning. This is…
In this letter, we propose an efficient and highly versatile loco-manipulation planning for humanoid robots. Loco-manipulation planning is a key technological brick enabling humanoid robots to autonomously perform object transportation by…
This paper presents a novel contact-implicit trajectory optimization method using an analytically solvable contact model to enable planning of interactions with hard, soft, and slippery environments. Specifically, we propose a novel contact…
In this paper, we present a model-free learning-based control scheme for the soft snake robot to improve its contact-aware locomotion performance in a cluttered environment. The control scheme includes two cooperative controllers: A…
Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for planning and control, requiring determination of both continuous and discrete contact configurations, such as contact points and modes. This leads to the non-convexity…
Snake robots offer considerable potential for endoscopic interventions due to their ability to follow curvilinear paths. Telemanipulation is an open problem due to hyper-redundancy, as input devices only allow a specification of six degrees…
Snakes are a remarkable evolutionary success story. Many snake-inspired robots have been proposed over the years. Soft robotic snakes (SRS) with their continuous and smooth bending capability better mimic their biological counterparts'…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…