Related papers: Holistic Optimization of Modular Robots
In this series of papers, we present a motion planning framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of nonholonomic mobile robots such as intelligent wheelchairs and autonomous cars. In Part I, we presented the mathematical…
The linearization of the equations of motion of a robotics system about a given state-input trajectory, including a controlled equilibrium state, is a valuable tool for model-based planning, closed-loop control, gain tuning, and state…
The fundamental goal assignment problem for a multi-robot application aims to assign a unique goal to each robot while ensuring collision-free paths, minimizing the total movement cost. A plausible algorithmic solution to this NP-hard…
This work presents a system to benchmark humanoid posture control and balance performances under perturbed conditions. The specific benchmarking scenario consists, for example, of balancing upright stance while performing voluntary…
Trajectory optimization (TO) is one of the most powerful tools for generating feasible motions for humanoid robots. However, including uncertainties and stochasticity in the TO problem to generate robust motions can easily lead to an…
This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…
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…
This paper presents a novel trajectory optimization formulation to solve the robotic assembly of the belt drive unit. Robotic manipulations involving contacts and deformable objects are challenging in both dynamic modeling and trajectory…
Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…
Controlling large-scale particle or robot systems is challenging because of their high dimensionality. We use a centralized stochastic approach that allows for optimal control at the cost of a central element instead of a decentralized…
Shared autonomy methods, where a human operator and a robot arm work together, have enabled robots to complete a range of complex and highly variable tasks. Existing work primarily focuses on one human sharing autonomy with a single robot.…
We address the problem of motion planning for a robotic manipulator with the task to place a grasped object in a cluttered environment. In this task, we need to locate a collision-free pose for the object that a) facilitates the stable…
Much as replacing hand-designed features with learned functions has revolutionized how we solve perceptual tasks, we believe learned algorithms will transform how we train models. In this work we focus on general-purpose learned optimizers…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
One simplifying assumption in existing and well-performing task allocation methods is that the robots are single-tasking: each robot operates on a single task at any given time. While this assumption is harmless to make in some situations,…
This paper focuses on robustness to disturbance forces and uncertain payloads. We present a novel formulation to optimize the robustness of dynamic trajectories. A straightforward transcription of this formulation into a nonlinear…
We design a distributed feedback optimization strategy, embedded into a modular ROS 2 control architecture, which allows a team of heterogeneous robots to cooperatively monitor and encircle a target while patrolling points of interest.…
For a multi-robot system equipped with heterogeneous capabilities, this paper presents a mechanism to allocate robots to tasks in a resilient manner when anomalous environmental conditions such as weather events or adversarial attacks…
The ultimate goal of all optimization methods is to solve real-world problems. For a successful project execution, knowledge about optimization and the application has to be pooled. As it is too inefficient to highly train one person in…
In many mobile robotics scenarios, such as drone racing, the goal is to generate a trajectory that passes through multiple waypoints in minimal time. This problem is referred to as time-optimal planning. State-of-the-art approaches either…