Related papers: Modular Robot Control with Motor Primitives
This paper presents a framework for the safety-critical control of robotic systems, when safety is defined on safe regions in the configuration space. To maintain safety, we synthesize a safe velocity based on control barrier function…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not…
This article takes a step to provide humanoid robots with adaptive morphology abilities. We present a systematic approach for enabling robotic covers to morph their shape, with an overall size fitting the anthropometric dimensions of a…
Recent Foundation Model-enabled robotics (FMRs) display greatly improved general-purpose skills, enabling more adaptable automation than conventional robotics. Their ability to handle diverse tasks thus creates new opportunities to replace…
A core aspect of human intelligence is the ability to learn new tasks quickly and switch between them flexibly. Here, we describe a modular continual reinforcement learning paradigm inspired by these abilities. We first introduce a visual…
Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
Safety and stability are common requirements for robotic control systems; however, designing safe, stable controllers remains difficult for nonlinear and uncertain models. We develop a model-based learning approach to synthesize robust…
Task-space Passivity-Based Control (PBC) for manipulation has numerous appealing properties, including robustness to modeling error and safety for human-robot interaction. Existing methods perform poorly in singular configurations, however,…
Identifying and understanding modular organizations is centrally important in the study of complex systems. Several approaches to this problem have been advanced, many framed in information-theoretic terms. Our treatment starts from the…
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…
We introduce a novel formulation for incorporating visual feedback in controlling robots. We define a generative model from actions to image observations of features on the end-effector. Inference in the model allows us to infer the robot…
Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
Manipulating objects with robotic hands is a complicated task. Not only the fingers of the hand, but also the pose of the robot's end effector need to be coordinated. Using human demonstrations of movements is an intuitive and…
Understanding and modeling human driver behavior is crucial for advanced vehicle development. However, unique driving styles, inconsistent behavior, and complex decision processes render it a challenging task, and existing approaches often…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
In this work we consider the problem of mobile robots that need to manipulate/transport an object via cables or robotic arms. We consider the scenario where the number of manipulating robots is redundant, i.e. a desired object configuration…
We present the design and implementation of a taskable reactive mobile manipulation system. In contrary to related work, we treat the arm and base degrees of freedom as a holistic structure which greatly improves the speed and fluidity of…
Human-robot collaboration is on the rise. Robots need to increasingly improve the efficiency and smoothness with which they assist humans by properly anticipating a human's intention. To do so, prediction models need to increase their…