Related papers: Complementarity-Free Multi-Contact Modeling and Op…

Manipulation with whole-body contact by humanoid robots offers distinct advantages, including enhanced stability and reduced load. On the other hand, we need to address challenges such as the increased computational cost of motion…

To enable humanoid robots to work robustly in confined environments, multi-contact motion that makes contacts not only at extremities, such as hands and feet, but also at intermediate areas of the limbs, such as knees and elbows, is…

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…

We present a convex formulation of compliant frictional contact and a robust, performant method to solve it in practice. By analytically eliminating contact constraints, we obtain an unconstrained convex problem. Our solver has proven…

In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…

Automating contact-rich manipulation of viscoelastic objects with rigid robots faces challenges including dynamic parameter mismatches, unstable contact oscillations, and spatiotemporal force-deformation coupling. In our prior work, a…

As robots move from the laboratory into the real world, motion planning will need to account for model uncertainty and risk. For robot motions involving intermittent contact, planning for uncertainty in contact is especially important, as…

Dexterous manipulation tasks often require contact switching, where fingers make and break contact with the object. We propose a method that plans trajectories for dexterous manipulation tasks involving contact switching using…

This article presents computationally efficient algorithms for modeling two special cases of rigid contact---contact with only viscous friction and contact without slip---that have particularly useful applications in robotic locomotion and…

Robotic dual-arm twisting is a common but very challenging task in both industrial production and daily services, as it often requires dexterous collaboration, a large scale of end-effector rotating, and good adaptivity for object…

Dexterous multi-fingered robotic hands can perform a wide range of manipulation skills, making them an appealing component for general-purpose robotic manipulators. However, such hands pose a major challenge for autonomous control, due to…

Hand synergies, or joint coordination patterns, have become an effective tool for achieving versatile robotic grasping with simple hands or planning algorithms. Here we propose a method to determine the hand synergies such that they can be…

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…

Traditional motion planning approaches for multi-legged locomotion divide the problem into several stages, such as contact search and trajectory generation. However, reasoning about contacts and motions simultaneously is crucial for the…

Grasping objects under uncertainty remains an open problem in robotics research. This uncertainty is often due to noisy or partial observations of the object pose or shape. To enable a robot to react appropriately to unforeseen effects, it…

A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…

Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where…

We present in-hand manipulation tasks where a robot moves an object in grasp, maintains its external contact mode with the environment, and adjusts its in-hand pose simultaneously. The proposed manipulation task leads to complex contact…

Achieving generalized in-hand object rotation remains a significant challenge in robotics, largely due to the difficulty of transferring policies from simulation to the real world. The complex, contact-rich dynamics of dexterous…

In recent years, multimodal locomotion capabilities have enabled robots to maneuver in both terrestrial and aerial domains. However, most of these robots are designed only for locomotion, and few possess the manipulation capabilities…