Related papers: A Safe Hybrid Control Framework for Car-like Robot…
Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe…
This paper addresses the challenge of safe navigation for rigid-body mobile robots in dynamic environments. We introduce an analytic approach to compute the distance between a polygon and an ellipse, and employ it to construct a control…
This work presents a novel framework for the formation control of multiple autonomous ground vehicles in an on-road environment. Unique challenges of this problem lie in 1) the design of collision avoidance strategies with obstacles and…
This work explores a collaborative method for ensuring safety in multi-agent formation control problems. We formulate a control barrier function (CBF) based safety filter control law for a generic distributed formation controller and extend…
In this paper, we introduce the notion of periodic safety, which requires that the system trajectories periodically visit a subset of a forward-invariant safe set, and utilize it in a multi-rate framework where a high-level planner…
Differential drive robots that can be modeled as a kinematic unicycle are a standard mobile base platform for many service and logistics robots. Safe and smooth autonomous motion around obstacles is a crucial skill for unicycle robots to…
Highway merges present difficulties for human drivers and automated vehicles due to incomplete situational awareness and a need for a structured (precedence, order) environment, respectively. In this paper, an unstructured merge algorithm…
This paper considers the general problem of transitioning theoretically safe controllers to hardware. Concretely, we explore the application of control barrier functions (CBFs) to sampled-data systems: systems that evolve continuously but…
This paper presents a method for local motion planning in unstructured environments with static and moving obstacles, such as humans. Given a reference path and speed, our optimization-based receding-horizon approach computes a local…
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…
Autonomous navigation of steel bridge inspection robots is essential for proper maintenance. The majority of existing robotic solutions for bridge inspection require human intervention to assist in the control and navigation. In this paper,…
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a…
In this paper, we solve the problem of finding a certified control policy that drives a robot from any given initial state and under any bounded disturbance to the desired reference trajectory, with guarantees on the convergence or bounds…
We consider nonconvex obstacle avoidance where a robot described by nonlinear dynamics and a nonconvex shape has to avoid nonconvex obstacles. Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental problem in robotics and well studied in control. However,…
Safety is a critical property for control systems in medicine, transportation, manufacturing, and other applications, and can be defined as ensuring positive invariance of a predefined safe set. This paper investigates the problems of…
This paper presents aUToPath, a unified online framework for global path-planning and control to address the challenge of autonomous navigation in cluttered urban environments. A key component of our framework is a novel hybrid planner that…
This letter studies a distributed collision avoidance control problem for a group of rigid bodies on a sphere. A rigid body network, consisting of multiple rigid bodies constrained to a spherical surface and an interconnection topology, is…
In this paper, the problem of making a safe compliant contact between a human and an assistive robot is considered. Users with disabilities have a need to utilize their assistive robots for physical human-robot interaction (PHRI) during…
Visual navigation is a core capability for mobile robots, yet end-to-end learning-based methods often struggle with generalization and safety in unseen, cluttered, or narrow environments. These limitations are especially pronounced in dense…
This paper presents a computationally lightweight and robust control framework for differential-drive mobile robots with dynamic uncertainties and external disturbances, guaranteeing the satisfaction of Temporal Reach-Avoid-Stay (T-RAS)…