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Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…

When modeling complex robot systems such as branched robots, whose kinematic structures are a tree, current techniques often require modeling the whole structure from scratch, even when partial models for the branches are available. This…

Robots deployed in many real-world settings need to be able to acquire new skills and solve new tasks over time. Prior works on planning with skills often make assumptions on the structure of skills and tasks, such as subgoal skills, shared…

This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling an on-orbit assembly mission scenario of a large flexible structure using a multi-arm robot. This methodology accounts for significant changes in inertia and flexibility…

Robot manipulation in real-world settings often requires adapting the robot's behavior to the current situation, such as by changing the sequences in which policies execute to achieve the desired task. Problematically, however, we show that…

This paper considers the motion planning problem for multiple tethered planar mobile robots. Each robot is attached to a fixed base by a flexible cable. Since the robots share a common workspace, the interactions amongst the robots, cables,…

Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping depth images? The short answer is no: current day robots can't. In this article, we address the problem of shaping plastic material with an anthropomorphic arm/hand robot, which observes the…

For a team of heterogeneous robots executing multiple tasks, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally allocate tasks to robots while accounting for their different capabilities. Motivated by the need that robot teams have in many…

The ability to plan for multi-step manipulation tasks in unseen situations is crucial for future home robots. But collecting sufficient experience data for end-to-end learning is often infeasible in the real world, as deploying robots in…

This paper presents a hierarchical framework to solve the multi-robot temporal task planning problem. We assume that each robot has its individual task specification and the robots have to jointly satisfy a global collaborative task…

The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…

We consider a team of mobile autonomous robots with the aim to cover a given set of targets. Each robot aims to select a target to cover and physically reach it by the final time in coordination with other robots given the locations of…

Applying micro-patterns to surfaces has been shown to impart useful physical properties such as drag reduction and hydrophobicity. However, current manufacturing techniques cannot produce micro-patterned surfaces at scale due to high-cost…

Multi-robot planning and coordination in uncertain environments is a fundamental computational challenge, since the belief space increases exponentially with the number of robots. In this paper, we address the problem of planning in…

In this work, we present an approach to planning for humanoid mobility. Humanoid mobility is a challenging problem, as the configuration space for a humanoid robot is intractably large, especially if the robot is capable of performing many…

Humans have an impressive ability to solve complex coordination problems in a fully distributed manner. This ability, if learned as a set of distributed multirobot coordination strategies, can enable programming large groups of robots to…

With the recent advances in the field of deep learning, learning-based methods are widely being implemented in various robotic systems that help robots understand their environment and make informed decisions to achieve a wide variety of…

We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…

This research paper addresses the challenges of exploration and navigation in unknown environments from an evolutionary swarm robotics perspective. Path formation plays a crucial role in enabling cooperative swarm robots to accomplish these…

Contact planning is crucial in locomoting systems.Specifically, appropriate contact planning can enable versatile behaviors (e.g., sidewinding in limbless locomotors) and facilitate speed-dependent gait transitions (e.g., walk-trot-gallop…