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Robotic surface consisting of many actuators can change shape to perform tasks, such as facilitating human-machine interactions and transporting objects. Increasing the number of actuators can enhance the robot's capacity, but controlling…
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…
The ability to accurately reconstruct the 3D facets of a scene is one of the key problems in robotic vision. However, even with recent advances with machine learning, there is no high-fidelity universal 3D reconstruction method for this…
Precision contouring control is crucial in industrial machining processes, particularly for applications such as laser and water jet cutting, where contouring accuracy directly determines product quality. This paper presents a novel control…
Accurate manipulation of a deformable body such as a piece of fabric is difficult because of its many degrees of freedom and unobservable properties affecting its dynamics. To alleviate these challenges, we propose the application of…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
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…
Deformable objects often appear in unstructured configurations. Tracing deformable objects helps bringing them into extended states and facilitating the downstream manipulation tasks. Due to the requirements for object-specific modeling or…
Controlling illumination can generate high quality information about object surface normals and depth discontinuities at a low computational cost. In this work we demonstrate a robot workspace-scaled controlled illumination approach that…
3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) is one of the most promising novel 3D representations that has received great interest in computer graphics and computer vision. While various systems have introduced editing capabilities for 3D GS, such as those…
Robots operating in unstructured environments face significant challenges when interacting with everyday objects like doors. They particularly struggle to generalize across diverse door types and conditions. Existing vision-based and…
Soft robots, compared to regular rigid robots, as their multiple segments with soft materials bring flexibility and compliance, have the advantages of safe interaction and dexterous operation in the environment. However, due to its…
We present an orientation adaptive controller to compensate for the effects of highly constrained environments on continuum manipulator actuation. A transformation matrix updated using optimal estimation techniques from optical flow…
One approach for feedback control using high dimensional and rich sensor measurements is to classify the measurement into one out of a finite set of situations, each situation corresponding to a (known) control action. This approach…
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…
This paper introduces a novel and general method to address the problem of using a general-purpose robot manipulator with a parallel gripper to wrap a deformable linear object (DLO), called a rope, around a rigid object, called a rod,…
State estimation of robotic systems is essential to implementing feedback controllers, which usually provide better robustness to modeling uncertainties than open-loop controllers. However, state estimation of soft robots is very…
This paper introduces a Cosserat rod based mathematical model for modeling a self-controllable variable curvature soft continuum robot. This soft continuum robot has a hollow inner channel and was developed with the ability to perform…
Continuum robots are flexible, thin manipulators capable of navigating confined or delicate environments making them well suited for surgical applications. Previous approaches to continuum robot state estimation typically rely on…
Mirroring the complex structures and diverse functions of natural organisms is a long-standing challenge in robotics. Modern fabrication techniques have greatly expanded the feasible hardware, but using these systems requires control…