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In this paper, we present a novel and generic data-driven method to servo-control the 3-D shape of continuum and soft robots embedded with fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors. Developments of 3-D shape perception and control technologies are…
Structured 3D representations such as keypoints and meshes offer compact, expressive descriptions of deformable objects, jointly capturing geometric and topological information useful for downstream tasks such as dynamics modeling and…
Safety critical control of robotic manipulation tasks involving deformable media such as fluids, cloth, and soft objects remains challenging because existing learning based approaches encode safety indirectly through reward shaping, which…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
Many modern nonlinear control methods aim to endow systems with guaranteed properties, such as stability or safety, and have been successfully applied to the domain of robotics. However, model uncertainty remains a persistent challenge,…
This paper presents a constraint-lifting control framework for designing stabilizing controllers that guarantee the forward invariance of a prescribed safe set. State-of-the-art safety-enforcing methods, such as control barrier functions…
Controlling the deformation of flexible objects is challenging due to their non-linear dynamics and high-dimensional configuration space. This work presents a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) simulator targeted at control…
In this paper, we investigate a decentralized formation control algorithm for an undirected formation control model. Unlike other formation control problems where only the shape of a configuration counts, we emphasize here also its…
This paper proposes a novel maneuvering technique for the complex-Laplacian-based formation control. We show how to modify the original weights that build the Laplacian such that a designed steady-state motion of the desired shape emerges…
3D world models (i.e., learning-based 3D dynamics models) offer a promising approach to generalizable robotic manipulation by capturing the underlying physics of environment evolution conditioned on robot actions. However, existing 3D world…
Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the…
This paper presents a correspondence-free, function-based sim-to-real learning method for controlling deformable freeform surfaces. Unlike traditional sim-to-real transfer methods that strongly rely on marker points with full…
This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…
In-Orbit Servicing and Active Debris Removal require advanced robotic capabilities for capturing and detumbling uncooperative targets. This work presents a hierarchical control framework for autonomous robotic capture of tumbling objects in…
Manipulating deformable linear objects (DLOs) such as wires and cables is crucial in various applications like electronics assembly and medical surgeries. However, it faces challenges due to DLOs' infinite degrees of freedom, complex…
Recent advancements in model-free deep reinforcement learning have enabled efficient agent training. However, challenges arise when determining the region of attraction for these controllers, especially if the region does not fully cover…
We present a novel Learning from Demonstration (LfD) method, Deformable Manipulation from Demonstrations (DMfD), to solve deformable manipulation tasks using states or images as inputs, given expert demonstrations. Our method uses…
Continuum manipulators offer intrinsic dexterity and safe geometric compliance for navigation within confined and obstacle-rich environments. However, their infinite-dimensional backbone deformation, unmodeled internal friction, and…
Point set registration is a powerful method that enables robots to manipulate deformable objects. By mapping the point cloud of the current object to the pre-trained point cloud, a transformation function can be constructed. The…
In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the problem of augmenting distance-based formation controllers with a secondary constraint for the purpose of preventing 3D formation ambiguities. Specifically, we introduce three controlled…