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The increasing need for sharing workspace and interactive physical tasks between robots and humans has raised concerns regarding safety of such operations. In this regard, controllable clutches have shown great potential for addressing…
While much work has been done recently in the realm of model-based control of soft robots and soft-rigid hybrids, most works examine robots that have an inherently serial structure. While these systems have been prevalent in the literature,…
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
An impedance-based control scheme is introduced for cooperative manipulators grasping a rigid load. The position and orientation of the load are to be maintained close to a desired trajectory, trading off tracking accuracy by low energy…
Position control devices enable precise selection, but significant clutching degrades performance. Clutching can be reduced with high control-display gain or pointer acceleration, but there are human and device limits. Elastic rate control…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Controlling large-scale particle or robot systems is challenging because of their high dimensionality. We use a centralized stochastic approach that allows for optimal control at the cost of a central element instead of a decentralized…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…
Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On…
Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
Highly articulated organisms serve as blueprints for incredibly dexterous mechanisms, but building similarly capable robotic counterparts has been hindered by the difficulties of developing electromechanical actuators with both the high…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…
This paper focusses on the energy-efficient control of a cable-driven robot for tasks that only require precise positioning at few points in their motion, and where that accuracy can be obtained through contacts. This includes the majority…
Series Elastic Actuators provide many benefits in force control of robots in unconstrained environments. These benefits include high force fidelity, extremely low impedance, low friction, and good force control bandwidth. Series Elastic…
In this paper, we devise methods for the multi- objective control of humanoid robots, a.k.a. prioritized whole- body controllers, that achieve efficiency and robustness in the algorithmic computations. We use a form of whole-body…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
A hierarchical control architecture is presented for energy-efficient control of legged robots subject to variety of linear/nonlinear inequality constraints such as Coulomb friction cones, switching unilateral contacts, actuator saturation…
Accurate frictional contact is critical in simulating the assembly of rod-like structures in the practical world, such as knots, hairs, flagella, and more. Due to their high geometric nonlinearity and elasticity, rod-on-rod contact remains…