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Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
An effective way to model the complex real world is to view the world as a composition of basic components of objects and transformations. Although humans through development understand the compositionality of the real world, it is…
Inverse kinematics - finding joint poses that reach a given Cartesian-space end-effector pose - is a common operation in robotics, since goals and waypoints are typically defined in Cartesian space, but robots must be controlled in joint…
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…
This paper presents a novel feedback method on the motion planning for unicycle robots in environments with static obstacles, along with an extension to the distributed planning and coordination in multi-robot systems. The method employs a…
Model generalization of the underlying dynamics is critical for achieving data efficiency when learning for robot control. This paper proposes a novel approach for learning dynamics leveraging the symmetry in the underlying robotic system,…
This paper presents a general-purpose formulation of a large class of discrete-time planning problems, with hybrid state and control-spaces, as factored transition systems. Factoring allows state transitions to be described as the…
Nonlinear balanced truncation is a model order reduction technique that reduces the dimension of nonlinear systems in a manner that accounts for either open- or closed-loop observability and controllability aspects of the system. Two…
We present a signal representation framework called the sparse manifold transform that combines key ideas from sparse coding, manifold learning, and slow feature analysis. It turns non-linear transformations in the primary sensory signal…
Solving bilevel optimization (BLO) problems to global optimality is generally intractable. A common surrogate is to compute a hyper-stationary point -- a stationary point of the hyper-objective function obtained by minimizing or maximizing…
We introduce a technique for recovering a sufficiently smooth function from its ray transform over a wide class of curves in a general region of Euclidean space. The method is based on a complexification of the underlying vector fields…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Direct collocation methods are powerful tools to solve trajectory optimization problems in robotics. While their resulting trajectories tend to be dynamically accurate, they may also present large kinematic errors in the case of constrained…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
Navigation functions provide both path and motion planning, which can be used to ensure obstacle avoidance and convergence in the sphere world. When dealing with complex and realistic scenarios, constructing a transformation to the sphere…
This paper introduces a new generalized control method designed for multi-degrees-of-freedom devices to help people with limited motion capabilities in their daily activities. The challenge lies in finding the most adapted strategy for the…
In this paper, we first propose a novel maneuvering technique compatible with displacement-consensus-based formation controllers. We show that the formation can be translated with an arbitrary velocity by modifying the weights in the…
Robotic calibration allows for the fusion of data from multiple sensors such as odometers, cameras, etc., by providing appropriate transformational relationships between the corresponding reference frames. For wheeled robots equipped with…
This paper presents the application of a learning control approach for the realization of a fast and reliable pick-and-place application with a spherical soft robotic arm. The arm is characterized by a lightweight design and exhibits…
Many robotics applications require alignment and fusion of observations obtained at multiple views to form a global model of the environment. Multi-way data association methods provide a mechanism to improve alignment accuracy of pairwise…