Related papers: Compliant Explicit Reference Governor for Contact …

To achieve general-purpose dexterous manipulation, robots must rapidly devise and execute contact-rich behaviors. Existing model-based controllers are incapable of globally optimizing in real-time over the exponential number of possible…

This paper presents a computationally efficient solution for constraint management of multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) systems. The solution, referred to as the Decoupled Reference Governor (DRG), maintains the highly-attractive…

Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…

Deep Reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success in domains with well-defined reward structures, such as Atari games and locomotion. In contrast, dexterous manipulation lacks general-purpose reward formulations and…

We present ARRC (Advanced Reasoning Robot Control), a practical system that connects natural-language instructions to safe local robotic control by combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with RGB-D perception and guarded execution…

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…

Modular robotics enables the development of versatile and adaptive robotic systems with autonomous reconfiguration. This paper presents a modular robotic system in which each module has independent actuation, battery power, and control,…

We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…

Cyclic motions are fundamental patterns in robotic applications including industrial manipulation and legged robot locomotion. This paper proposes an approach for the online modulation of cyclic motions in robotic applications. For this…

Reference and command governors are add-on schemes that augment nominal closed-loop systems with the capability to enforce state and control constraints. They do this by monitoring and modifying, when necessary, the reference command.…

This paper presents a fault-tolerant control scheme for constrained linear systems. First, a new variant of the Reference Governor (RG) called At Once Reference Governor (AORG) is introduced. The AORG is distinguished from the conventional…

Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…

Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) task involves tight coupling between safety constraints and compliance with human intentions. In this paper, a novel switched model reference admittance controller is developed to maintain compliance…

Reliable brain-computer interface (BCI) control of robots provides an intuitive and accessible means of human-robot interaction, particularly valuable for individuals with motor impairments. However, existing BCI-Robot systems face major…

In this paper, a control scheme is developed based on an input constrained Model Predictive Controller (MPC) and the idea of modifying the reference command to enforce constraints, usual of Reference Governors (RG). The proposed scheme,…

Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) is a navigation task that requires an agent to follow a language instruction in a realistic environment. The understanding of environments is a crucial part of the VLN-CE…

This paper proposes a learning reference governor (LRG) approach to enforce state and control constraints in systems for which an accurate model is unavailable, and this approach enables the reference governor to gradually improve command…

Implicit communication plays such a crucial role during social exchanges that it must be considered for a good experience in human-robot interaction. This work addresses implicit communication associated with the detection of physical…

Standard attribution heatmaps show where a vision-language model (VLM) focuses, but they do not reveal whether the recovered evidence is organized by the queried spatial relation or merely reflects image layout. To address this problem, we…

We present FORGE, a method for sim-to-real transfer of force-aware manipulation policies in the presence of significant pose uncertainty. During simulation-based policy learning, FORGE combines a force threshold mechanism with a dynamics…