Related papers: Scaling Whole-body Multi-contact Manipulation with…

Contact planning is crucial in locomoting systems.Specifically, appropriate contact planning can enable versatile behaviors (e.g., sidewinding in limbless locomotors) and facilitate speed-dependent gait transitions (e.g., walk-trot-gallop…

Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…

Object reconstruction and inspection tasks play a crucial role in various robotics applications. Identifying paths that reveal the most unknown areas of the object is paramount in this context, as it directly affects reconstruction…

As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…

Many robotic tasks involving some form of 3D visual perception greatly benefit from a complete knowledge of the working environment. However, robots often have to tackle unstructured environments and their onboard visual sensors can only…

This paper presents a sim-to-real approach that enables legged robots to dynamically manipulate large and heavy objects with whole-body dexterity. Our key insight is that by performing test-time steering of a pre-trained whole-body control…

Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate complex holistic movements and multiple contact interactions…

Reduced-order template models are widely used to control high degree-of-freedom legged robots, but existing methods for template-based whole-body control rely heavily on heuristics and often suffer from robustness issues. In this letter, we…

In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We…

Humanoid robots often face significant balance issues due to the motion of their heavy limbs. These challenges are particularly pronounced when attempting dynamic motion or operating in environments with irregular terrain. To address this…

Articulated and flexible objects constitute a challenge for robot manipulation tasks but are present in different real-world settings, including home and industrial environments. Current approaches to the manipulation of articulated and…

This paper investigates the problem of efficient computation of physically consistent multi-contact behaviors. Recent work showed that under mild assumptions, the problem could be decomposed into simpler kinematic and centroidal dynamic…

Recent work has demonstrated real-time mapping and reconstruction from dense perception, while motion planning based on distance fields has been shown to achieve fast, collision-free motion synthesis with good convergence properties.…

Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…

Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…

Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar…

Both, robot and hand-eye calibration haven been object to research for decades. While current approaches manage to precisely and robustly identify the parameters of a robot's kinematic model, they still rely on external devices, such as…

Training general-purpose robots requires learning from large and diverse data sources. Current approaches rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We present a scalable framework for training manipulation…

We present a centralized algorithmic framework for solving multi-robot path planning problems in general, two-dimensional, continuous environments while minimizing globally the task completion time. The framework obtains high levels of…

We present an efficient spacetime optimization method to automatically generate animations for a general volumetric, elastically deformable body. Our approach can model the interactions between the body and the environment and automatically…