Related papers: Unified Complementarity-Based Contact Modeling and…
Designing planners and controllers for contact-rich manipulation is extremely challenging as contact violates the smoothness conditions that many gradient-based controller synthesis tools assume. Contact smoothing approximates a non-smooth…
The empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in the setting of contact-rich manipulation leaves much to be understood from a model-based perspective, where the key difficulties are often attributed to (i) the explosion of contact…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
We show that contact-rich motion planning is also sparsity-rich when viewed as polynomial optimization (POP). We can exploit not only the correlative and term sparsity patterns that are general to all POPs, but also specialized sparsity…
Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…
We present a convex formulation of compliant frictional contact and a robust, performant method to solve it in practice. By analytically eliminating contact constraints, we obtain an unconstrained convex problem. Our solver has proven…
Fast and safe motion is crucial for the successful deployment of physically interactive robots. Parallel robots (PRs) offer the potential for higher speeds while maintaining the same energy limits due to their low moving masses. However,…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…
Continuum soft robots are inherently underactuated and subject to intrinsic input constraints, making dynamic control particularly challenging, especially in hybrid rigid-soft robots. While most existing methods focus on quasi-static…
Control techniques like MPC can realize contact-rich manipulation which exploits dynamic information, maintaining friction limits and safety constraints. However, contact geometry and dynamics are required to be known. This information is…
This paper proposes a unified robust motion controller for the position and force control problems of compliant robot manipulators driven by Series Elastic Actuators (SEAs). It is shown that the dynamic model of the compliant robot includes…
Loco-Manipulation for humanoid robots aims to enable robots to integrate mobility with upper-body tracking capabilities. Most existing approaches adopt hierarchical architectures that decompose control into isolated upper-body…
Robots must satisfy safety-critical state and input constraints despite disturbances and model mismatch. We introduce a robust model predictive control (RMPC) formulation that is fast, scalable, and compatible with real-time implementation.…
We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
The ability to reason about and predict the outcome of contacts is paramount to the successful execution of many robot tasks. Analytical rigid-body contact models are used extensively in planning and control due to their computational…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantees, and…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…