Related papers: RICE: Reactive Interaction Controller for Cluttere…
Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…
Collision-free navigation in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles is essential for many multi-robot tasks. Dynamic obstacles may also be interactive, i.e., their behavior varies based on the behavior of other entities.…
In this paper we address mobile manipulation planning problems in the presence of sensing and environmental uncertainty. In particular, we consider mobile sensing manipulators operating in environments with unknown geometry and uncertain…
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…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
Mobile manipulator robots operating in complex domestic and industrial environments must effectively coordinate their base and arm motions while avoiding obstacles. While current reactive control methods gracefully achieve this…
Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…
Small robots that can operate under the plant canopy can enable new possibilities in agriculture. However, unlike larger autonomous tractors, autonomous navigation for such under canopy robots remains an open challenge because Global…
Animating human-scene interactions such as pick-and-place tasks in cluttered, complex layouts is a challenging task, with objects of a wide variation of geometries and articulation under scenarios with various obstacles. The main difficulty…
In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…
Grasping in cluttered environments is a fundamental but challenging robotic skill. It requires both reasoning about unseen object parts and potential collisions with the manipulator. Most existing data-driven approaches avoid this problem…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks are commonly found in modern manufacturing settings. However, manually designing a robot controller is considered hard for traditional control methods as the controller requires an effective combination of…
Navigation and guidance of autonomous vehicles is a fundamental problem in robotics, which has attracted intensive research in recent decades. This report is mainly concerned with provable collision avoidance of multiple autonomous vehicles…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
Applying intelligent robot arms in dynamic uncertain environments (i.e., flexible production lines) remains challenging, which requires efficient algorithms for real time trajectory generation. The motion planning problem for robot…
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,…
We present a model predictive control (MPC) framework for efficient navigation of mobile robots in cluttered environments. The proposed approach integrates a finite-segment shortest path planner into the finite-horizon trajectory…
We address the longstanding challenge of producing flexible, realistic humanoid character controllers that can perform diverse whole-body tasks involving object interactions. This challenge is central to a variety of fields, from graphics…
We propose a control framework which can utilize tactile information by exploiting the complementarity structure of contact dynamics. Since many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking…