Related papers: Constraint Manifold Exploration for Efficient Cont…

Industrial robots are widely used in various manufacturing environments due to their efficiency in doing repetitive tasks such as assembly or welding. A common problem for these applications is to reach a destination without colliding with…

Shape assembly, the process of combining parts into a complete whole, is a crucial robotic skill with broad real-world applications. Among various assembly tasks, geometric assembly--where broken parts are reassembled into their original…

We consider nonconvex obstacle avoidance where a robot described by nonlinear dynamics and a nonconvex shape has to avoid nonconvex obstacles. Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental problem in robotics and well studied in control. However,…

Computational topology provides a tool, persistent homology, to extract quantitative descriptors from structured objects (images, graphs, point clouds, etc). These descriptors can then be involved in optimization problems, typically as a…

Semantic segmentation aims to robustly predict coherent class labels for entire regions of an image. It is a scene understanding task that powers real-world applications (e.g., autonomous navigation). One important application, the use of…

Robotic systems with redundant degrees of freedom can achieve the same task outcome using multiple configurations, resulting in solution sets that form manifolds in the configuration space. Existing approaches typically exploit such…

Sampling-based motion planners (SBMPs) are widely used to compute dynamically feasible robot paths. However, their reliance on uniform sampling often leads to poor efficiency and slow planning in complex environments. We introduce a novel…

Modern lightweight dual-arm robots bring the physical capabilities to quickly take over tasks at typical industrial workplaces designed for workers. In times of mass-customization, low setup times including the instructing/specifying of new…

Mobile manipulation planning commonly adopts a decoupled approach that performs planning separately on the base and the manipulator. While this approach is fast, it can generate sub-optimal paths. Another direction is a coupled approach…

Perception-for-grasping is a challenging problem in robotics. Inexpensive range sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect provide sensing capabilities that have given new life to the effort of developing robust and accurate perception methods…

Autonomous robot navigation in complex environments requires robust perception as well as high-level scene understanding due to perceptual challenges, such as occlusions, and uncertainty introduced by robot movement. For example, a robot…

We present a framework for a ground-aerial robotic team to explore large, unstructured, and unknown environments. In such exploration problems, the effectiveness of existing exploration-boosting heuristics often scales poorly with the…

Flexible industrial production systems will play a central role in the future of manufacturing due to higher product individualization and customization. A key component in such systems is the robotic grasping of known or unknown objects in…

Sample based ray marching is an effective method for direct volume rendering of unstructured meshes. However, sampling such meshes remains expensive, and strategies to reduce the number of samples taken have received relatively little…

In order to perform autonomous sequential manipulation tasks, perception in cluttered scenes remains a critical challenge for robots. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach for robust sequential scene estimation and manipulation…

In recent years, semidefinite relaxations of common optimization problems in robotics have attracted growing attention due to their ability to provide globally optimal solutions. In many cases, it was shown that specific handcrafted…

Autonomous exploration is a widely studied problem where a robot incrementally builds a map of a previously unknown environment. The robot selects the next locations to reach using an exploration strategy. To do so, the robot has to balance…

Most object manipulation strategies for robots are based on the assumption that the object is rigid (i.e., with fixed geometry) and the goal's details have been fully specified (e.g., the exact target pose). However, there are many tasks…

Nowadays, several real-world tasks require adequate environment coverage for maintaining communication between multiple robots, for example, target search tasks, environmental monitoring, and post-disaster rescues. In this study, we look…

Soft robotics has emerged as the standard solution for grasping deformable objects, and has proven invaluable for mobile robotic exploration in extreme environments. However, despite this growth, there are no widely adopted computational…