Related papers: Model-based Optimal Control for Rigid-Soft Underac…

Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…

This study presents an innovative approach to optimal gait control for a soft quadruped robot enabled by four Compressible Tendon-driven Soft Actuators (CTSAs). Improving our previous studies of using model-free reinforcement learning for…

Many robotic systems are underactuated, meaning not all degrees of freedom can be directly controlled due to lack of actuators, input constraints, or state-dependent actuation. This property, compounded by modeling uncertainties and…

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…

Developing robot controllers in a simulated environment is advantageous but transferring the controllers to the target environment presents challenges, often referred to as the "sim-to-real gap". We present a method for continuous…

Modelling of contact-rich tasks is challenging and cannot be entirely solved using classical control approaches due to the difficulty of constructing an analytic description of the contact dynamics. Additionally, in a manipulation task like…

Envisioned applications for humanoid robots call for the design of balancing and walking controllers. While promising results have been recently achieved, robust and reliable controllers are still a challenge for the control community…

Model-based controllers using a linearized model around the system's equilibrium point is a common approach in the control of a wheeled humanoid due to their less computational load and ease of stability analysis. However, controlling a…

Passivity-based control is a cornerstone of control theory and an established design approach in robotics. Its strength is based on the passivity theorem, which provides a powerful interconnection framework for robotics. However, the design…

In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…

Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…

This paper investigates real-time control strategies for dynamical systems that involve frictional contact interactions. Hybridness and underactuation are key characteristics of these systems that complicate the design of feedback…

Model-based control requires an accurate model of the system dynamics for precisely and safely controlling the robot in complex and dynamic environments. Moreover, in the presence of variations in the operating conditions, the model should…

We present a new framework for prioritized multi-task motion-force control of fully-actuated robots. This work is established on a careful review and comparison of the state of the art. Some control frameworks are not optimal, that is they…

In this paper, near optimal tracking of a class of nonlinear systems is addressed. Adaptive (approximate) dynamic programming approach is used to calculate the optimal control in closed form. ADP (Adaptive (approximate) dynamic programming)…

Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance…

Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…

Soft continuum robots achieve complex deformation through elastic equilibrium, making their reachable motions governed jointly by structural design and actuation-induced mechanics. This work develops a general formulation that integrates…

Ranging from cart-pole systems and autonomous bicycles to bipedal robots, control of these underactuated balance robots aims to achieve both external (actuated) subsystem trajectory tracking and internal (unactuated) subsystem balancing…

Direct collocation methods are powerful tools to solve trajectory optimization problems in robotics. While their resulting trajectories tend to be dynamically accurate, they may also present large kinematic errors in the case of constrained…