Related papers: Malleable Robots
In advanced manufacturing, strict safety guarantees are required to allow humans and robots to work together in a shared workspace. One of the challenges in this application field is the variety and unpredictability of human behavior,…
For locomotion, is an arm on a legged robot a liability or an asset for locomotion? Biological systems evolved additional limbs beyond legs that facilitates postural control. This work shows how a manipulator can be an asset for legged…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Multisection continuum arms offer complementary characteristics to those of traditional rigid-bodied robots. Inspired by biological appendages, such as elephant trunks and octopus arms, these robots trade rigidity for compliance, accuracy…
Current research on collaborative robots (cobots) in physical rehabilitation largely focuses on repeated motion training for people undergoing physical therapy (PuPT), even though these sessions include phases that could benefit from…
Simultaneous locomotion and manipulation enables robots to interact with their environment beyond the constraints of a fixed base. However, coordinating legged locomotion with arm manipulation, while considering safety and compliance during…
Despite a slow neuromuscular system, humans easily outperform modern robot technology, especially in physical contact tasks. How is this possible? Biological evidence indicates that motor control of biological systems is achieved by a…
This paper studies real-time collaborative robot (cobot) handling, where the cobot maneuvers an object under human dynamic gesture commands. Enabling dynamic gesture commands is useful when the human needs to avoid direct contact with the…
Nowadays, industries are showing a growing interest in human-robot collaboration, particularly for shared tasks. This requires intelligent strategies to plan a robot's motions, considering both task constraints and human-specific factors…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
The Industry 4.0 paradigm promises shorter development times, increased ergonomy, higher flexibility, and resource efficiency in manufacturing environments. Collaborative robots are an important tangible technology for implementing such a…
Human dexterity arises from combining high-level task reasoning with finger-level dexterity control and physical compliance at the muscle and skin layers. In robotics, large Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate text-conditioned…
Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…
Automation applications are pushing the deployment of many high DoF manipulators in warehouse and manufacturing environments. This has motivated many efforts on optimizing manipulation tasks involving a single arm. Coordinating multiple…
A flexible operation of multiple robotic manipulators in a shared workspace requires an online trajectory planning with static and dynamic collision avoidance. In this work, we propose a real-time capable motion control algorithm, based on…
Safe and efficient collaboration among multiple robots in unstructured environments is increasingly critical in the era of Industry 4.0. However, achieving robust and autonomous collaboration among humans and other robots requires modern…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordinated control of cooperative robots locomoting in the presence of fixed (holonomic) constraints. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) to ensure the safe…
Robots operating in everyday environments must navigate and manipulate within densely cluttered spaces, where physical contact with surrounding objects is unavoidable. Traditional safety frameworks treat contact as unsafe, restricting…
In an attempt to confer robots with complex manipulation capabilities, dual-arm anthropomorphic systems have become an important research topic in the robotics community. Most approaches in the literature rely upon a great understanding of…