Related papers: Optimal Cosserat-based deformation control for rob…
In this paper we present a new approach for dynamic motion planning for legged robots. We formulate a trajectory optimization problem based on a compact form of the robot dynamics. Such a form is obtained by projecting the rigid body…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
Skeleton-based and cage-based deformation techniques represent the two most popular approaches to control real-time deformations of digital shapes and are, to a vast extent, complementary to one another. Despite their complementary roles,…
Applications from manipulation to autonomous vehicles rely on robust and general object tracking to safely perform tasks in dynamic environments. We propose the first certifiably optimal category-level approach for simultaneous shape…
This paper investigates adaptive control of nonlinear robot manipulators with parametric uncertainty. Motivated by generating closed-loop robot dynamics with enhanced transmission capability of a reference torque and with connection to…
Interactive perception enables robots to manipulate the environment and objects to bring them into states that benefit the perception process. Deformable objects pose challenges to this due to significant manipulation difficulty and…
The robotic manipulation of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) is a vital and challenging task that is important in many practical applications. Classical model-based approaches to this problem require an accurate model to capture how robot…
We present a method for system identification of flexible objects by measuring forces and displacement during interaction with a manipulating arm. We model the object's structure and flexibility by a chain of rigid bodies connected by…
In a world designed for legs, quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids have the opportunity to impact emerging robotics applications from logistics, to agriculture, to home assistance. The goal of this survey is to cover the recent progress toward…
Knowledge of 3-D object shape is of great importance to robot manipulation tasks, but may not be readily available in unstructured environments. While vision is often occluded during robot-object interaction, high-resolution tactile sensors…
This paper bridges optimization and control, and presents a novel closed-loop control framework based on natural gradient descent, offering a trajectory-oriented alternative to traditional cost-function tuning. By leveraging the Fisher…
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects (e.g., fruits/vegetables, internal organs, bottles/boxes) is critical for real-world applications such as food processing, robotic surgery, and household automation. However, developing grasp…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…
In this paper, we design feedback control laws for soft robots modelled using the Cosserat rod, which is spatially discretised using the Piecewise Constant Strain (PCS) approach. The PCS approach transforms the nonlinear PDEs describing the…
Robots need both visual and contact sensing to effectively estimate the state of their environment. Camera RGBD data provides rich information of the objects surrounding the robot, and shape priors can help correct noise and fill in gaps…
We want to build robots that are useful in unstructured real world applications, such as doing work in the household. Grasping in particular is an important skill in this domain, yet it remains a challenge. One of the key hurdles is…
We demonstrate model-based, visual robot manipulation of linear deformable objects. Our approach is based on a state-space representation of the physical system that the robot aims to control. This choice has multiple advantages, including…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…
We propose OptCtrlPoints, a data-driven framework designed to identify the optimal sparse set of control points for reproducing target shapes using biharmonic 3D shape deformation. Control-point-based 3D deformation methods are widely…
Recent advancements in constrained kinematic control make it an attractive strategy for controlling robots with arbitrary geometry in challenging tasks. Most current works assume that the robot kinematic model is precise enough for the task…