Related papers: Scaling Whole-body Multi-contact Manipulation with…
In this paper, we propose a unified whole-body control framework for velocity-controlled mobile collaborative robots which can distribute task motion into the arm and mobile base according to specific task requirements by adjusting…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Motion prediction in unstructured environments is a difficult problem and is essential for safe and efficient human-robot space sharing and collaboration. In this work, we focus on manipulation movements in environments such as homes,…
With the advancements in human-robot interaction (HRI), robots are now capable of operating in close proximity and engaging in physical interactions with humans (pHRI). Likewise, contact-based pHRI is becoming increasingly common as robots…
Intelligence lies not only in the brain (decision-making processes) but in the body (physical morphology). The morphology of robots can significantly influence how they interact with the physical world, crucial for manipulating objects in…
Robot motion planning has made vast advances over the past decades, but the challenge remains: robot mobile manipulators struggle to plan long-range whole-body motion in common household environments in real time, because of…
Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…
Most existing methods for motion planning of mobile robots involve generating collision-free trajectories. However, these methods focusing solely on contact avoidance may limit the robots' locomotion and can not be applied to tasks where…
Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance…
Path planning for multiple robots is well studied in the AI and robotics communities. For a given discretized environment, robots need to find collision-free paths to a set of specified goal locations. Robots can be fully anonymous,…
Exploiting interaction with the environment is a promising and powerful way to enhance stability of humanoid robots and robustness while executing locomotion and manipulation tasks. Recently some works have started to show advances in this…
Topology optimization methods have widely been used in various industries, owing to their potential for providing promising design candidates for mechanical devices. However, their applications are usually limited to the objects which do…
An appropriate user interface to collect human demonstration data for deformable object manipulation has been mostly overlooked in the literature. We present an interaction design for demonstrating cloth folding to robots. Users choose pick…
Numerical optimization has become a popular approach to plan smooth motion trajectories for robots. However, when sharing space with humans, balancing properly safety, comfort and efficiency still remains challenging. This is notably the…
A central aspect of robotic motion planning is collision avoidance, where a multitude of different approaches are currently in use. Optimization-based motion planning is one method, that often heavily relies on distance computations between…
While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…
We introduce a robust control architecture for the whole-body motion control of torque controlled robots with arms and legs. The method is based on the robust control of contact forces in order to track a planned Center of Mass trajectory.…
Simulation of contact and friction dynamics is an important basis for control- and learning-based algorithms. However, the numerical difficulties of contact interactions pose a challenge for robust and efficient simulators. A…
One major recurring challenge in deploying manipulation robots is determining the optimal placement of manipulators to maximize performance. This challenge is exacerbated in complex, cluttered agricultural environments of high-value crops,…
In this study, we present a novel method for enhancing the computational efficiency of whole-body control for humanoid robots, a challenge accentuated by their high degrees of freedom. The reduced-dimension rigid body dynamics of a floating…