Related papers: Explicit Contact Optimization in Whole-Body Contac…
This work addresses the challenge of a robot using real-time feedback from contact sensors to reliably manipulate a movable object on a cluttered tabletop. We formulate contact manipulation as a partially observable Markov decision process…
Tendon-driven continuum robots (TDCRs), with their flexible backbones, offer the advantage of being used for navigating complex, cluttered environments. However, to do so, they typically require multiple segments, often leading to complex…
Efficient and robust trajectories play a crucial role in contact-rich manipulation, which demands accurate mod- eling of object-robot interactions. Many existing approaches rely on point contact models due to their computational effi-…
Contact-implicit trajectory optimization offers an appealing method of automatically generating complex and contact-rich behaviors for robot manipulation and locomotion. The scalability of such techniques has been limited, however, by the…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
Cooperative object transport in unstructured environments remains challenging for assistive humanoids because strong, time-varying interaction forces can make tracking-centric whole-body control unreliable, especially in close-contact…
In this paper, we present a real-time whole-body planner for collision-free legged mobile manipulation. We enforce both self-collision and environment-collision avoidance as soft constraints within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme…
Manipulation planning is the problem of finding a sequence of robot configurations that involves interactions with objects in the scene, e.g., grasping and placing an object, or more general tool-use. To achieve such interactions,…
Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively…
Continuum robotic grasping, inspired by biological appendages such as octopus arms and elephant trunks, provides a versatile and adaptive approach to object manipulation. Unlike conventional rigid-body grasping, continuum robots leverage…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in high-level reasoning and semantic understanding, applying them directly to contact-rich manipulation remains a challenge due to…
Manipulation planning is the task of computing robot trajectories that move a set of objects to their target configuration while satisfying physically feasibility. In contrast to existing works that assume known object templates, we are…
Attempts to achieve robotic Within-Hand-Manipulation (WIHM) generally utilize either high-DOF robotic hands with elaborate sensing apparatus or multi-arm robotic systems. In prior work we presented a simple robot hand with variable friction…
In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We…
Dexterous in-hand manipulation is an essential skill of production and life. However, the highly stiff and mutable nature of contacts limits real-time contact detection and inference, degrading the performance of model-based methods.…
In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…
Whether rigid or compliant, contact interactions are inherent to robot motions, enabling them to move or manipulate things. Contact interactions result from complex physical phenomena, that can be mathematically cast as Nonlinear…
Optimal control approaches in combination with trajectory optimization have recently proven to be a promising control strategy for legged robots. Computationally efficient and robust algorithms were derived using simplified models of the…
Recently, the centroidal momentum dynamics has received substantial attention to plan dynamically consistent motions for robots with arms and legs in multi-contact scenarios. However, it is also non convex which renders any optimization…
Recently, many humanoid robots have been increasingly deployed in various facilities, including hospitals and assisted living environments, where they are often remotely controlled by human operators. Their kinematic redundancy enhances…