Related papers: Scaling Whole-body Multi-contact Manipulation with…
Humans can exploit contacts anywhere on their body surface to manipulate large and heavy items, objects normally out of reach or multiple objects at once. However, such manipulation through contacts using the whole surface of the body…
Whole-body contact is an effective strategy for improving the stability and efficiency of the motion of robots. For robots to automatically perform such motions, we propose a posture generation method that employs all available surfaces of…
In this paper, we present an approach for generating a variety of whole-body motions for a humanoid robot. We extend the available Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches for walking on flat terrain to plan for both vertical motion of the…
In this paper, we devise methods for the multi- objective control of humanoid robots, a.k.a. prioritized whole- body controllers, that achieve efficiency and robustness in the algorithmic computations. We use a form of whole-body…
Motion imitation is a pivotal and effective approach for humanoid robots to achieve a more diverse range of complex and expressive movements, making their performances more human-like. However, the significant differences in kinematics and…
In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. We model the hybrid nature of a generic multi-limbed mobile…
Robotic manipulation demands precise control over both contact forces and motion trajectories. While force control is essential for achieving compliant interaction and high-frequency adaptation, it is limited to operations in close…
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…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…
Humanoid robots rely on multi-contact planners to navigate a diverse set of environments, including those that are unstructured and highly constrained. To synthesize stable multi-contact plans within a reasonable time frame, most planners…
This paper presents a multi-contact motion adaptation framework that enables teleoperation of high degree-of-freedom (DoF) robots, such as quadrupeds and humanoids, for loco-manipulation tasks in multi-contact settings. Our proposed…
Contact-based motion planning for manipulation, object exploration or balancing often requires finding sequences of fixed and sliding contacts and planning the transition from one contact in the environment to another. However, most…
Glovebox decommissioning tasks usually require manipulating relatively heavy objects in a highly constrained environment. Thus, contact with the surroundings becomes inevitable. In order to allow the robot to interact with the environment…
Current approaches for humanoid whole-body manipulation, primarily relying on teleoperation or visual sim-to-real reinforcement learning, are hindered by hardware logistics and complex reward engineering. Consequently, demonstrated…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
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…
If we consider human manipulation, it is clear that contact-rich manipulation (CRM)-the ability to use any surface of the manipulator to make contact with objects-can be far more efficient and natural than relying solely on end-effectors…
Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the…
Transferring human motion to a mobile robotic manipulator and ensuring safe physical human-robot interaction are crucial steps towards automating complex manipulation tasks in human-shared environments. In this work, we present a novel…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…