Related papers: Explicit Contact Optimization in Whole-Body Contac…
This paper presents a novel trajectory optimization formulation to solve the robotic assembly of the belt drive unit. Robotic manipulations involving contacts and deformable objects are challenging in both dynamic modeling and trajectory…
Real-time synthesis of legged locomotion maneuvers in challenging industrial settings is still an open problem, requiring simultaneous determination of footsteps locations several steps ahead while generating whole-body motions close to the…
This paper presents a method for constrained motion planning from vision, which enables a robot to move its end-effector over an observed surface, given start and destination points. The robot has no prior knowledge of the surface shape,…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…
This paper presents a trajectory optimization and control approach for the guidance of an orbital four-arm robot in extravehicular activities. The robot operates near the target spacecraft, enabling its arm's end-effectors to reach the…
We present an efficient spacetime optimization method to automatically generate animations for a general volumetric, elastically deformable body. Our approach can model the interactions between the body and the environment and automatically…
Motion planning in high-dimensional space is a challenging task. In order to perform dexterous manipulation in an unstructured environment, a robot with many degrees of freedom is usually necessary, which also complicates its motion…
In this paper, we introduce the humanoid robot DRACO 3 by providing a high-level description of its design and control. This robot features proximal actuation and mechanical artifacts to provide a high range of hip, knee and ankle motion.…
Contact-implicit motion planning-embedding contact sequencing as implicit complementarity constraints-holds the promise of leveraging continuous optimization to discover new contact patterns online. Nevertheless, the resulting optimization,…
Recent advancements in robotics have enabled robots to navigate complex scenes or manipulate diverse objects independently. However, robots are still impotent in many household tasks requiring coordinated behaviors such as opening doors.…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
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…
Mobile manipulator robots operating in complex domestic and industrial environments must effectively coordinate their base and arm motions while avoiding obstacles. While current reactive control methods gracefully achieve this…
Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…
This paper presents a reactive controller for planar manipulation tasks that leverages machine learning to achieve real-time performance. The approach is based on a Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulation, where the goal is to find an…
Modern, torque-controlled service robots can regulate contact forces when interacting with their environment. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful method to solve the underlying control problem, allowing to plan for whole-body…
Recent progress in contact-rich robotic manipulation has been striking, yet most deployed systems remain confined to simple, scripted routines. One of the key barriers is the lack of motion planning algorithms that can provide verifiable…
Providing mobile robots with the ability to manipulate objects has, despite decades of research, remained a challenging problem. The problem is approachable in constrained environments where there is ample prior knowledge of the environment…
Humanoid robots locomote by making and breaking contacts with their environment. A crucial problem is therefore to find precise criteria for a given contact to remain stable or to break. For rigid surface contacts, the most general…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…