Related papers: Shape-Interpretable Visual Self-Modeling Enables G…
The robotic manipulation of compliant objects is currently one of the most active problems in robotics due to its potential to automate many important applications. Despite the progress achieved by the robotics community in recent years,…
Hyper-redundant robots offer high dexterity, making them good at operating in confined and unstructured environments. To extend the reachable workspace, we built a multi-segment flexible rack actuated planar robot. However, the compliance…
Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
This paper proposes a unified vision-based manipulation framework using image contours of deformable/rigid objects. Instead of using human-defined cues, the robot automatically learns the features from processed vision data. Our method…
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…
Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…
Continuum and soft robots can leverage complex actuator shapes to take on useful shapes while actuating only a few of their many degrees of freedom. Continuum robots that also grow increase the range of potential shapes that can be actuated…
This paper presents a novel method for modeling the shape of a continuum robot as a Neural Configuration Euclidean Distance Function (N-CEDF). By learning separate distance fields for each link and combining them through the kinematics…
The robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects has shown great potential in a wide range of real-world applications. However, it presents many challenges due to the objects' complex nonlinearity and high-dimensional configuration. In…
3D-aware visual pretraining has proven effective in improving the performance of downstream robotic manipulation tasks. However, existing methods are constrained to Euclidean embedding spaces, whose flat geometry limits their ability to…
Shape control of deformable objects is a challenging and important robotic problem. This paper proposes a model-free controller using novel 3D global deformation features based on modal analysis. Unlike most existing controllers using…
In this paper we present a novel approach for representing and evolving deformable active contours. The method combines piecewise regular B{\'e}zier models and curve evolution defined by local Free Form Deformation. The contour deformation…
Tendon-driven continuum robots have been gaining popularity in medical applications due to their ability to curve around complex anatomical structures, potentially reducing the invasiveness of surgery. However, accurate modeling is required…
The robotic shape control of deformable linear objects has garnered increasing interest within the robotics community. Despite recent progress, the majority of shape control approaches can be classified into two main groups: open-loop…
As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…
The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot…
For many real-world robotics applications, robots need to continually adapt and learn new concepts. Further, robots need to learn through limited data because of scarcity of labeled data in the real-world environments. To this end, my…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
We present a novel vision-based control method to make a group of ground mobile robots achieve a specified formation shape with unspecified size. Our approach uses multiple aerial control units equipped with downward-facing cameras, each…