Related papers: Robot Cell Modeling via Exploratory Robot Motions:…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
It is challenging to perform system identification on soft robots due to their underactuated, high-dimensional dynamics. In this work, we present a data-driven modeling framework, based on geometric mechanics (also known as gauge theory)…
A cable-driven soft-bodied robot with redundancy can conduct the trajectory tracking task and in the meanwhile fulfill some extra constraints, such as tracking through an end-effector in designated orientation, or get rid of the evitable…
Designing safety-critical control for robotic manipulators is challenging, especially in a cluttered environment. First, the actual trajectory of a manipulator might deviate from the planned one due to the complex collision environments and…
This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its…
Socially-aware robotic navigation is essential in environments where humans and robots coexist, ensuring both safety and comfort. However, most existing approaches have been primarily developed for mobile robots, leaving a significant gap…
As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…
In complex scenarios where typical pick-and-place techniques are insufficient, often non-prehensile manipulation can ensure that a robot is able to fulfill its task. However, non-prehensile manipulation is challenging due to its…
Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
The six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) robotic arm has gained widespread application in human-coexisting environments. While previous research has predominantly focused on functional motion generation, the critical aspect of expressive motion in…
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…
Many collaborative human-robot tasks require the robot to stay safe and work efficiently around humans. Since the robot can only stay safe with respect to its own model of the human, we want the robot to learn a good model of the human in…
Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is…
Rapid robotic system development sets a demand for multi-disciplinary methods and tools to explore and compare design alternatives. In this paper, we present collaborative modeling that combines discrete-event models of controller software…
Robots have been critical instruments to space exploration by providing access to environments beyond human limitations. Jumping robot concepts are attractive solutions to negotiate complex terrain. However, among the engineering challenges…
Collision detection and collision avoidance are essential components in these systems for safe human-robot interactions. Robotics systems that can work "out-of-the-box" without excessive amount of installation and calibration from the…
The long-standing, dominant approach to robotic obstacle negotiation relies on mapping environmental geometry to avoid obstacles. However, this approach does not allow for traversal of cluttered obstacles, hindering applications such as…
Convex free regions provide a structured and optimization-friendly representation of collision-free space for robot navigation in unknown and cluttered environments. However, existing methods typically enlarge local collision-free regions…
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…