Related papers: Displacement-Actuated Continuum Robots: A Joint Sp…
Training long-horizon robotic policies in complex physical environments is essential for many applications, such as robotic manipulation. However, learning a policy that can generalize to unseen tasks is challenging. In this work, we…
It is known that pure row contractions with one-dimensional defect spaces can be classified up to unitary equivalence by compressions of the standard $d$-shift acting on the full Fock space. Upon settling for a softer relation than unitary…
Distributed optimization consists of multiple computation nodes working together to minimize a common objective function through local computation iterations and network-constrained communication steps. In the context of robotics,…
Recent advancements in adaptive control for reference trajectory tracking enable quadrupedal robots to perform locomotion tasks under challenging conditions. There are methods enabling the estimation of the external disturbances in terms of…
The Discrete Dislocation (DD) analysis and its computional modeling have been advanced significantly over the past decade. This progress has been further magnified by the idea to couple DD with continuum mechanics analysis in association…
Tilt-rotor aerial robots enable omnidirectional maneuvering through thrust vectoring, but introduce significant control challenges due to the strong coupling between joint and rotor dynamics. While model-based controllers can achieve high…
Automatic data abstraction is an important capability for both benchmarking machine intelligence and supporting summarization applications. In the former one asks whether a machine can `understand' enough about the meaning of input data to…
This paper presents an object manipulation strategy for the Variable Topology Truss (VTT) system, a truss robot that comprises actuated truss members connected by passive spherical joints. Although truss robots were originally proposed as…
This paper studies the construction of dynamic symbolic abstractions for nonlinear control systems via dynamic quantization. Since computational complexity is a fundamental problem in the use of discrete abstractions, a dynamic quantizer…
A metamorphic robotic system is an aggregate of homogeneous robot units which can individually and selectively locomote in such a way as to change the global shape of the system. We introduce a mathematical framework for defining and…
Objects' rigid motions in 3D space are described by rotations and translations of a highly-correlated set of points, each with associated $x,y,z$ coordinates that real-valued networks consider as separate entities, losing information.…
Single locomotion robots often struggle to adapt in highly variable or uncertain environments, especially in emergencies. In this paper, a multi-modal deformable robot is introduced that can both fly and drive. Compatibility issues with…
This paper presents a nonlinear control design for highly underactuated balance robots, which possess more numbers of unactuated degree-of-freedom (DOF) than actuated ones. To address the challenge of simultaneously trajectory tracking of…
We introduce the notion of a contractible subshift. This is a strengthening of the notion of strong irreducibility, where we require that the gluings are given by a block map. We show that a subshift is a retract of a full shift if and only…
To enlarge the translational workspace of cable-driven robots, one common approach is to increase the number of cables. However, this introduces two challenges: (1) cable interference significantly reduces the rotational workspace, and (2)…
Shifted combinatorial optimization is a new nonlinear optimization framework, which is a broad extension of standard combinatorial optimization, involving the choice of several feasible solutions at a time. It captures well studied and…
Finite-state abstractions (a.k.a. symbolic models) present a promising avenue for the formal verification and synthesis of controllers in continuous-space control systems. These abstractions provide simplified models that capture the…
A hybrid continuum robot design is introduced that combines a proximal tendon-actuated section with a distal telescoping section comprised of permanent-magnet spheres actuated using an external magnet. While, individually, each section can…
The low displacement rank (LDR) framework for structured matrices represents a matrix through two displacement operators and a low-rank residual. Existing use of LDR matrices in deep learning has applied fixed displacement operators…
This paper introduces abstractions that are meaningful for computers and that can be built and used according to computers' own criteria, i.e., computable abstractions. It is analyzed how abstractions can be seen to serve as the building…