Related papers: PushingBots: Collaborative Pushing via Neural Acce…

In warehousing systems, to enhance logistical efficiency amid surging demand volumes, much focus is placed on how to reasonably allocate tasks to robots. However, the robots labor is still inevitably wasted to some extent. In response to…

The growing integration of mobile robots in shared workspaces requires efficient path planning and coordination between the agents, accounting for safety and productivity. In this work, we propose a digital model-based optimization…

A particular type of assistive robots designed for physical interaction with objects could play an important role assisting with mobility and fall prevention in healthcare facilities. Autonomous mobile manipulation presents a hurdle prior…

One central goal of robotics is to enable robots to interact with the physical world. Traditional manipulation studies primarily focus on single robots and relatively small objects. However, factory and domestic environments often require…

This work addresses the coordination problem of multiple robots with the goal of finding specific hazardous targets in an unknown area and dealing with them cooperatively. The desired behaviour for the robotic system entails multiple…

We introduce a novel strategy for multi-robot sorting of waste objects using Reinforcement Learning. Our focus lies on finding optimal picking strategies that facilitate an effective coordination of a multi-robot system, subject to…

For rapid growth in technology and automation, human tasks are being taken over by robots as robots have proven to be better with both speed and precision. One of the major and widespread usages of these robots is in the industrial…

While many robotic tasks, like manipulation and locomotion, are fundamentally based in making and breaking contact with the environment, state-of-the-art control policies struggle to deal with the hybrid nature of multi-contact motion. Such…

Coordinating a fully distributed multi-agent system (MAS) can be challenging when the communication channel has very limited capabilities in terms of sending rate and packet payload. When the MAS has to deal with active obstacles in a…

The present work provides a new approach to solve the well-known multi-robot co-operative box pushing problem as a multi objective optimization problem using modified Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization. The method proposed here…

The increasing presence of robots alongside humans, such as in human-robot teams in manufacturing, gives rise to research questions about the kind of behaviors people prefer in their robot counterparts. We term actions that support…

Heterogeneous multi-robot systems feature significant adaptability for complex environments. However, effective collaboration that fully exploits the robots' potential remains a core challenge. This paper proposes a decentralized…

In this paper, we introduce a method to deal with the problem of robot local path planning among pushable objects -- an open problem in robotics. In particular, we achieve that by training multiple agents simultaneously in a physics-based…

In this paper we consider the problem of coordinating robotic systems with different kinematics, sensing and vision capabilities to achieve certain mission goals. An approach that makes use of a heterogeneous team of agents has several…

This paper addresses two intertwined needs for collaborative robots operating in shop-floor environments. The first is the ability to perform complex manipulation operations, such as those on articulated or even flexible objects, in a way…

This paper addresses the challenge of enabling a single robot to effectively assist multiple humans in decision-making for task planning domains. We introduce a comprehensive framework designed to enhance overall team performance by…

There is invariably a trade-off between safety and efficiency for collaborative robots (cobots) in human-robot collaborations. Robots that interact minimally with humans can work with high speed and accuracy but cannot adapt to new tasks or…

Caging is a promising tool which allows a robot to manipulate an object without directly reasoning about the contact dynamics involved. Furthermore, caging also provides useful guarantees in terms of robustness to uncertainty, and often…

We develop an autonomous navigation algorithm for a robot operating in two-dimensional environments cluttered with obstacles having arbitrary convex shapes. The proposed navigation approach relies on a hybrid feedback to guarantee global…

Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable'…