Related papers: CONCERT: a Modular Reconfigurable Robot for Constr…
Collaborative robots are being increasingly utilized in industrial production lines due to their efficiency and accuracy. However, the close proximity between humans and robots can pose safety risks due to the robot's high-speed movements…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Robots are often built from standardized assemblies, (e.g. arms, legs, or fingers), but each robot must be trained from scratch to control all the actuators of all the parts together. In this paper we demonstrate a new approach that takes a…
Objective: The status of human-robot collaboration for assembly applications is reviewed and key current challenges for the research community and practitioners are presented. Background: As the pandemic of COVID-19 started to surface the…
We present M, an open-source, low-cost social robot platform designed to reduce platform friction that slows social robotics research by making robots easier to reproduce, modify, and deploy in real-world settings. M combines a modular…
One of the key challenges in the collaboration within heterogeneous multi-robot systems is the optimization of the amount and type of data to be shared between robots with different sensing capabilities and computational resources. In this…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Tendon-driven robots, a type of continuum robot, have the potential to reduce the invasiveness of surgery by enabling access to difficult-to-reach anatomical targets. In the future, the automation of surgical tasks for these robots may help…
This paper develops a robotic manipulation planner for human-robot collaborative assembly. Unlike previous methods which study an independent and fully AI-equipped autonomous system, this paper explores the subtask distribution between a…
A new generation of robot systems which are modular, flexible and safe for human-robot interaction are needed. Existing cobots seem to meet only the later and require a modular approach to improve their reconfigurability and…
Drilling, grinding, and setting anchors on vertical walls are fundamental processes in everyday construction work. Manually doing these works is error-prone, potentially dangerous, and elaborate at height. Today, heavy mobile ground robots…
This paper presents a novel modular robot system that can self-reconfigure to achieve omnidirectional movements for collaborative object transportation. Each robotic module is equipped with a steerable omni-wheel for navigation and is…
The Robotarium, a remotely accessible swarm-robotics testbed, has provided free, open access to robotics and controls research for hundreds of users in thousands of experiments. This high level of usage requires autonomy in the system,…
Modular reconfigurable robots require reliable mechanisms for automated module exchange, but conventional rigid active couplings often fail due to inevitable positioning and orientational errors. To address this, we propose a…
With a slender redundant body, the tendon-driven robot (TDR) has a large workspace and great maneuverability while working in complex environments. TDR comprises multiple independently controlled robot segments, each with a set of driving…
The Industrial Assembly Challenge at the World Robot Summit was held in 2018 to showcase the state-of-the-art of autonomous manufacturing systems. The challenge included various tasks, such as bin picking, kitting, and assembly of standard…
Human-robot collaborative assembly systems enhance the efficiency and productivity of the workplace but may increase the workers' cognitive demand. This paper proposes an online and quantitative framework to assess the cognitive workload…
Mechanical compliance is a key design parameter for dynamic contact-rich manipulation, affecting task success and safety robustness over contact geometry variation. Design of soft robotic structures, such as compliant fingers, requires…
Recent progress in humanoid robots has unlocked agile locomotion skills, including backflipping, running, and crawling. Yet it remains challenging for a humanoid robot to perform forceful manipulation tasks such as moving objects, wiping,…