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Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…
Machine perception is an important prerequisite for safe interaction and locomotion in dynamic environments. This requires not only the timely perception of surrounding geometries and distances but also the ability to react to changing…
Anatomical models of a medical robot's environment can significantly help guide design and development of a new robotic system. These models can be used for benchmarking motion planning algorithms, evaluating controllers, optimizing…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
Recently, the navigation of mobile robots in unknown environments has become a particularly significant research topic. Previous studies have primarily employed real-time environmental mapping using cameras and LiDAR, along with…
Moving in complex environments is an essential capability of intelligent mobile robots. Decades of research and engineering have been dedicated to developing sophisticated navigation systems to move mobile robots from one point to another.…
Soft growing robots are novel devices that mimic plant-like growth for navigation in cluttered or dangerous environments. Their ability to adapt to surroundings, combined with advancements in actuation and manufacturing technologies, allows…
Recent literature in the robotics community has focused on learning robot behaviors that abstract out lower-level details of robot control. To fully leverage the efficacy of such behaviors, it is necessary to select and sequence them to…
This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
We consider exploration tasks in which an autonomous mobile robot incrementally builds maps of initially unknown indoor environments. In such tasks, the robot makes a sequence of decisions on where to move next that, usually, are based on…
Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…
Accurate modelling of object deformations is crucial for a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, where interacting with soft or deformable objects is essential. Current methods struggle to generalise to unseen forces or adapt to new…
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,…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…
This article introduces XPLORER, a passive deformable UAV with a spring-augmented chassis and proprioceptive state awareness, designed to endure collisions and maintain smooth contact. We develop a fast-converging external force estimation…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
As mobile robots become useful performing everyday tasks in complex real-world environments, they must be able to traverse a range of difficult terrain types such as stairs, stepping stones, gaps, jumps and narrow passages. This work…
Online generation of collision free trajectories is of prime importance for autonomous navigation. Dynamic environments, robot motion and sensing uncertainties adds further challenges to collision avoidance systems. This paper presents an…