Related papers: Computational co-design of structure and feedback …
Control co-design (CCD) explores physical and control design spaces simultaneously to optimize a system's performance. A commonly used CCD framework aims to achieve open-loop optimal control (OLOC) trajectory while optimizing the physical…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
We automate soft robotic hand design iteration by co-optimizing design and control policy for dexterous manipulation skills in simulation. Our design iteration pipeline combines genetic algorithms and policy transfer to learn control…
Uncertainties in contact dynamics and object geometry remain significant barriers to robust robotic manipulation. Caging mitigates these uncertainties by constraining an object's mobility without requiring precise contact modeling. However,…
Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…
Merging and splitting are of great significance for rigid body networks in making such networks reconfigurable. The main challenges lie in simultaneously ensuring the compositionality of the distributed controllers and the mesh stability of…
A fruitful collaboration is based on the mutual knowledge of each other skills and on the possibility of communicating their own limits and proposing alternatives to adapt the execution of a task to the capabilities of the collaborators.…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Topology optimization methods have widely been used in various industries, owing to their potential for providing promising design candidates for mechanical devices. However, their applications are usually limited to the objects which do…
Achieving cooperative transportation by aerial robot teams ensures flexibility regarding payloads and robustness against failures, which has garnered significant attention in recent years. This study proposes a flexible decentralized…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
Advanced machine learning algorithms require platforms that are extremely robust and equipped with rich sensory feedback to handle extensive trial-and-error learning without relying on strong inductive biases. Traditional robotic designs,…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support collaboration with human problem-holders increases.…
Over the last few decades, multicopters have become significantly popular because of their various applications. However, multicopters suffer from poor endurance performance as compared to other aircraft configurations with lifting…
We consider the design of optimal localized feedback gains for one-dimensional formations in which vehicles only use information from their immediate neighbors. The control objective is to enhance coherence of the formation by making it…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
Controlling soft robots with precision is a challenge due in large part to the difficulty of constructing models that are amenable to model-based control design techniques. Koopman Operator Theory offers a way to construct explicit linear…