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Continuum robots (CR) offer excellent dexterity and compliance in contrast to rigid-link robots, making them suitable for navigating through, and interacting with, confined environments. However, the study of path planning for CRs while…
Admittance control is a commonly used strategy for regulating robotic systems, such as quadruped and humanoid robots, allowing them to respond compliantly to contact forces during interactions with their environments. However, it can lead…
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,…
The advent of tactile sensors in robotics has sparked many ideas on how robots can leverage direct contact measurements of their environment interactions to improve manipulation tasks. An important line of research in this regard is that of…
Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem:…
Series elastic robots are best able to follow trajectories which obey the limitations of their actuators, since they cannot instantly change their joint forces. In fact, the performance of series elastic actuators can surpass that of ideal…
This paper presents a novel control strategy to herd groups of non-cooperative evaders by means of a team of robotic herders. In herding problems, the motion of the evaders is typically determined by strongly nonlinear and heterogeneous…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
To achieve general-purpose dexterous manipulation, robots must rapidly devise and execute contact-rich behaviors. Existing model-based controllers are incapable of globally optimizing in real-time over the exponential number of possible…
While rigid robots are extensively used in various applications, they are limited in the tasks they can perform and can be unsafe in close human-robot interactions. Soft robots on the other hand surpass the capabilities of rigid robots in…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
This paper presents a method for robot self-recognition and self-adaptation through the analysis of the contact between the robot end effector and its surrounding environment. Often, in off-line robot programming, the idealized robotic…
Modern two and four legged robots exhibit impressive mobility on complex terrain, largely attributed to advancement in learning algorithms. However, these systems often rely on high-bandwidth sensing and onboard computation to…
This paper presents a new technique to control highly redundant mechanical systems, such as humanoid robots. We take inspiration from two approaches. Prioritized control is a widespread multi-task technique in robotics and animation: tasks…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
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…
In this paper, we investigate the adaptive control problem for robot manipulators with both the uncertain kinematics and dynamics. We propose two adaptive control schemes to realize the objective of task-space trajectory tracking…
Humanoid robots have the potential to mimic human motions with high visual fidelity, yet translating these motions into practical, physical execution remains a significant challenge. Existing techniques in the graphics community often…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting soft robots' behavior, but its computation time can limit practical applications. In this paper, a learning-based approach based on condensation of the FEM model is…
In this paper, a new discrete-time approach to model the clutches engagement/disengagement in a two-speed powershift is proposed. The core idea is the development of a model for the computation of the exact torque needed to achieve the…