Related papers: A Passivity-Based Variable Impedance Controller fo…
Compliance control is essential for safe physical interaction, yet its adoption is limited by hardware requirements such as force torque sensors. While recent reinforcement learning approaches aim to bypass these constraints, they often…
Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…
Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…
We propose a CompliantVLA-adaptor that augments the state-of-the-art Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models with vision-language model (VLM)-informed context-aware variable impedance control (VIC) to improve the safety and effectiveness of…
Robots deployed in dynamic environments must be able to not only follow diverse language instructions but flexibly adapt when user intent changes mid-execution. While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have advanced multi-task…
Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…
Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
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…
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…
Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…
Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…
Series Elastic Actuation (SEA) has become prevalent in applications involving physical human-robot interaction as it provides considerable advantages over traditional stiff actuators in terms of stability robustness and fidelity of force…
Intrinsically elastic robots surpass their rigid counterparts in a range of different characteristics. By temporarily storing potential energy and subsequently converting it to kinetic energy, elastic robots are capable of highly dynamic…
Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot…
The safety of mobile robots in dynamic environments is predicated on making sure that they do not collide with obstacles. In support of such safety arguments, we analyze and formally verify a series of increasingly powerful safety…
In this paper, we present a complete and efficient implementation of a knowledge-sharing augmented kinesthetic teaching approach for efficient task execution in robotics. Our augmented kinesthetic teaching method integrates intuitive human…
Autonomous navigation is a fundamental task for robot vacuum cleaners in indoor environments. Since their core function is to clean entire areas, robots inevitably encounter dead zones in cluttered and narrow scenarios. Existing planning…
Learning strategic robot behavior -- like that required in pursuit-evasion interactions -- under real-world constraints is extremely challenging. It requires exploiting the dynamics of the interaction, and planning through both physical…
Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…