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Nonprehensile manipulation through precise pushing is an essential skill that has been commonly challenged by perception and physical uncertainties, such as those associated with contacts, object geometries, and physical properties. For…
In unlabeled multi-robot motion planning several interchangeable robots operate in a common workspace. The goal is to move the robots to a set of target positions such that each position will be occupied by some robot. In this paper, we…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
Micro- and nanorobots are often controlled by global input signals, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field. These fields move each robot maximally until it hits a stationary obstacle or another stationary robot. This paper…
In micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is…
We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…
Grasping target objects is a fundamental skill for robotic manipulation, but in cluttered environments with stacked or occluded objects, a single-step grasp is often insufficient. To address this, previous work has introduced pushing as an…
Bloxorz is an online puzzle game where players move a 1 by 1 by 2 block by tilting it on a subset of the two dimensional grid. Bloxorz features switches that open and close trapdoors. The puzzle is to move the block from its initial…
Multi-pushdown systems are a standard model for concurrent recursive programs, but they have an undecidable reachability problem. Therefore, there have been several proposals to underapproximate their sets of runs so that reachability in…
While recent advances in artificial intelligence have achieved human-level performance in environments like Starcraft and Go, many physical reasoning tasks remain challenging for modern algorithms. To date, few algorithms have been…
In this paper, we study the program-point reachability problem of concurrent pushdown systems that communicate via unbounded and unordered message buffers. Our goal is to relax the common restriction that messages can only be retrieved by a…
We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…
We consider the problem of reconfiguring a two-dimensional connected grid arrangement of passive building blocks from a start configuration to a goal configuration, using a single active robot that can move on the tiles, remove individual…
Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance,…
In this paper, we seek to provide a simpler proof that the relocation problem in Ricochet Robots (Lunar Lockout with fixed geometry) is PSPACE-complete via a reduction from Finite Function Generation (FFG). Although this result was…
We extend the motion-planning-through-gadgets framework to several new scenarios involving various numbers of robots/agents, and analyze the complexity of the resulting motion-planning problems. While past work considers just one robot or…
Non-prehensile manipulation of diverse objects remains a core challenge in robotics, driven by unknown physical properties and the complexity of contact-rich interactions. Recent advances in contact-implicit model predictive control…
Motivated by advances is nanoscale applications and simplistic robot agents, we look at problems based on using a global signal to move all agents when given a limited number of directional signals and immovable geometry. We study a model…
We focus on push-based multi-object rearrangement planning using a nonholonomically constrained mobile robot. The simultaneous geometric, kinematic, and physics constraints make this problem especially challenging. Prior work on…
Higher-order pushdown systems (PDSs) generalise pushdown systems through the use of higher-order stacks, that is, a nested "stack of stacks" structure. These systems may be used to model higher-order programs and are closely related to the…