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In this series of papers, we present a motion planning framework for planning comfortable and customizable motion of nonholonomic mobile robots such as intelligent wheelchairs and autonomous cars. In Part I, we presented the mathematical…
As robotic systems continue to address emerging issues in areas such as logistics, mobility, manufacturing, and disaster response, it is increasingly important to rapidly generate safe and energy-efficient trajectories. In this article, we…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Traversing environments with arbitrary obstacles poses significant challenges for bipedal robots. In some cases, whole body motions may be necessary to maneuver around an obstacle, but most existing footstep planners can only select from a…
Motion planning seeks a collision-free path in a configuration space (C-space), representing all possible robot configurations in the environment. As it is challenging to construct a C-space explicitly for a high-dimensional robot, we…
A novel multi-robot path planning approach is presented in this paper. Based on the standard Dijkstra, the algorithm looks for the optimal paths for a formation of robots, taking into account the possibility of split and merge. The…
High-speed motions in pick-and-place operations are critical to making robots cost-effective in many automation scenarios, from warehouses and manufacturing to hospitals and homes. However, motions can be too fast -- such as when the object…
Modeling and manipulating elasto-plastic objects are essential capabilities for robots to perform complex industrial and household interaction tasks (e.g., stuffing dumplings, rolling sushi, and making pottery). However, due to the high…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Collision-free mobile robot navigation is an important problem for many robotics applications, especially in cluttered environments. In such environments, obstacles can be static or dynamic. Dynamic obstacles can additionally be…
This paper studies path synthesis for nonholonomic mobile robots moving in two-dimensional space. We first address the problem of interpolating paths expressed as sequences of straight line segments, such as those produced by some planning…
This paper proposes SoftGM, an octopus-inspired distributed control architecture for segmented soft robotic arms that learn to reach targets in contact-rich environments using online obstacle discovery without relying on global obstacle…
Planning for multi-robot teams in complex environments is a challenging problem, especially when these teams must coordinate to accomplish a common objective. In general, optimal solutions to these planning problems are computationally…
Studying snake robot locomotion in a cluttered environment has been a complicated task because the motion model is discontinuous due to the physical contact with obstacles, and the contact force cannot be determined solely by contact…
Continuum robots, characterized by their high flexibility and infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs), have gained prominence in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and hazardous environment exploration. However, the intrinsic…
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…
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,…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
Robotic surgery for minimally invasive surgery can reduce the surgeon's workload by autonomously guiding robotic forceps. Movement of the robot is restricted around a fixed insertion port. The robot often encounters angle limitations during…