Related papers: Robotic Shepherding in Cluttered and Unknown Envir…
The problem of guiding a flock of agents to a destination by the repulsion forces exerted by a smaller number of external agents is called the shepherding problem. This problem has attracted attention due to its potential applications,…
Physical human-robot interaction offers the potential to leverage human intelligence and robot physical capabilities to enable a range of exciting applications, e.g., collaborative robots for rehabilitation. Safety is critical for the…
Autonomous robot navigation can be particularly demanding, especially when the surrounding environment is not known and safety of the robot is crucial. This work relates to the synthesis of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) through data for…
Safe navigation in unknown and cluttered environments remains a challenging problem in robotics. Model Predictive Contour Control (MPCC) has shown promise for performant obstacle avoidance by enabling precise and agile trajectory tracking,…
Swarm control is a difficult problem due to the need to guide a large number of agents simultaneously. We cast the problem as a shepherding problem, similar to biological dogs guiding a group of sheep towards a goal. The shepherd needs to…
This paper presents a time-varying soft-maximum composite control barrier function (CBF) that can be used to ensure safety in an a priori unknown environment, where local perception information regarding the safe set is periodically…
A robot guide dog has compelling advantages over animal guide dogs for its cost-effectiveness, potential for mass production, and low maintenance burden. However, despite the long history of guide dog robot research, previous studies were…
Ensuring safety for autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments can be challenging due to factors such as unmodeled dynamics, noisy sensor measurements, and partial observability. To account for these limitations, it is common to…
Control barrier functions (CBF) are widely explored to enforce the safety-critical constraints on nonlinear systems recently. There are many researchers incorporating the control barrier functions into path planning algorithms to find a…
This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordinated control of cooperative robots locomoting in the presence of fixed (holonomic) constraints. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) to ensure the safe…
Control Barrier Functions (CBF) are widely used to enforce the safety-critical constraints on nonlinear systems. Recently, these functions are being incorporated into a path planning framework to design safety-critical path planners.…
Robots operating in everyday environments must navigate and manipulate within densely cluttered spaces, where physical contact with surrounding objects is unavoidable. Traditional safety frameworks treat contact as unsafe, restricting…
We introduce a novel method for mobile robot navigation in dynamic, unknown environments, leveraging onboard sensing and distributionally robust optimization to impose probabilistic safety constraints. Our method introduces a…
Maintaining energy sufficiency of a battery-powered robot system is a essential for long-term missions. This capability should be flexible enough to deal with different types of environment and a wide range of missions, while constantly…
Robot motion planning is central to real-world autonomous applications, such as self-driving cars, persistence surveillance, and robotic arm manipulation. One challenge in motion planning is generating control signals for nonlinear systems…
This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots…
Safety has been of paramount importance in motion planning and control techniques and is an active area of research in the past few years. Most safety research for mobile robots target at maintaining safety with the notion of collision…
This paper presents a novel approach that allows a swarm of heterogeneous robots to produce simultaneously segregative and flocking behaviors using only local sensing. These behaviors have been widely studied in swarm robotics and their…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
Multi-agent shepherding represents a challenging distributed control problem where herder agents must coordinate to guide independently moving targets to desired spatial configurations. Most existing control strategies assume cohesive…