Related papers: Infinite-Dimensional Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematic…
Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…
Active control of the shape of soft robots is challenging. Despite having an infinite number of passive degrees of freedom (DOFs), soft robots typically only have a few actively controllable DOFs, limited by the number of degrees of…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
The motion control of wheeled mobile robots at high speeds under adverse ground conditions is a difficult task, since the robots' wheels may be subject to different kinds of slip. This work introduces an adaptive kinematic controller that…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
In order for a bimanual robot to manipulate an object that is held by both hands, it must construct motion plans such that the transformation between its end effectors remains fixed. This amounts to complicated nonlinear equality…
Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…
With the recent advances in machine learning, problems that traditionally would require accurate modeling to be solved analytically can now be successfully approached with data-driven strategies. Among these, computing the inverse…
End-to-end robot manipulation policies offer significant potential for enabling embodied agents to understand and interact with the world. Unlike traditional modular pipelines, end-to-end learning mitigates key limitations such as…
Solving the analytical inverse kinematics (IK) of redundant manipulators in real time is a difficult problem in robotics since its solution for a given target pose is not unique. Moreover, choosing the optimal IK solution with respect to…
We study the path planning problem for continuum-arm robots, in which we are given a starting and an end point, and we need to compute a path for the tip of the continuum arm between the two points. We consider both cases where obstacles…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
Magnetic soft robots have attracted growing interest due to their unique advantages in terms of untethered actuation and excellent controllability. However, finding the required magnetization patterns or magnetic fields to achieve the…
Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new…
High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…
The Inverse Kinematics (IK) problem is to nd robot control parameters to bring it into the desired position under the kinematics and collision constraints. We present a global solution to the optimal IK problem for a general serial 7DOF…
It is well-known that inverse dynamics models can improve tracking performance in robot control. These models need to precisely capture the robot dynamics, which consist of well-understood components, e.g., rigid body dynamics, and effects…
Many applications require a robot to accurately track reference end-effector trajectories. Certain trajectories may not be tracked as single, continuous paths due to the robot's kinematic constraints or obstacles elsewhere in the…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Inverse kinematics is an important and challenging problem in the operation of industrial manipulators. This study proposes a simple inverse kinematics calculation scheme for an industrial serial manipulator. The proposed technique can…