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Collaborative robots must simultaneously be safe enough to operate in close proximity to human operators and powerful enough to assist users in industrial tasks such as lifting heavy equipment. The requirement for safety necessitates that…
This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…
A key challenge towards the goal of multi-part assembly tasks is finding robust sensorimotor control methods in the presence of uncertainty. In contrast to previous works that rely on a priori knowledge on whether two parts match, we aim to…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
Conventional robots possess a limited understanding of their kinematics and are confined to preprogrammed tasks, hindering their ability to leverage tools efficiently. Driven by the essential components of tool usage - grasping the desired…
Many industries extensively use flexible materials. Effective approaches for handling flexible objects with a robot manipulator must address residual vibrations. Existing solutions rely on complex models, use additional instrumentation for…
Modular Reconfigurable Robots (MRRs) represent an exciting path forward for industrial robotics, opening up new possibilities for robot design. Compared to monolithic manipulators, they promise greater flexibility, improved maintainability,…
This paper proposes a distributed on-orbit spacecraft assembly algorithm, where future spacecraft can assemble modules with different functions on orbit to form a spacecraft structure with specific functions. This form of spacecraft…
Insertion operations are a critical element of most robotic assembly operation, and peg-in-hole (PiH) insertion is one of the most widely studied tasks in the industrial and academic manipulation communities. PiH insertion is in fact an…
The disassembly of small household appliances poses significant challenges due to their complex and curved geometries, which render traditional rigid fixtures inadequate. In this paper, we propose a modular vacuum-based fixturing system…
Modern applications of robotics typically involve a robot control system with an inner PI (proportional-integral) or PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control loop and an outer user-specified control loop. The existing outer loop…
Robotic manipulators, traditionally designed with classical joint-link articulated structures, excel in industrial applications but face challenges in human-centered and general-purpose tasks requiring greater dexterity and adaptability. To…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
Cooperative transportation by multi-aerial robots has the potential to support various payloads and improve failsafe against dropping. Furthermore, changing the attachment positions of robots according payload characteristics increases the…
The range of robot activities is expanding from industries with fixed environments to diverse and changing environments, such as nursing care support and daily life support. In particular, autonomous construction of robots that are…
Quadruped robots have strong adaptability to extreme environments but may also experience faults. Once these faults occur, robots must be repaired before returning to the task, reducing their practical feasibility. One prevalent concern…
Robotic manipulators are widely used in modern manufacturing processes. However, their deployment in unstructured environments remains an open problem. To deal with the variety, complexity, and uncertainty of real-world manipulation tasks,…
We argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
In this paper, we propose and demonstrate an adaptive-sliding mode control for trajectory tracking control of robot manipulators subjected to uncertain dynamics, vibration disturbance, and payload variation disturbance. Throughout this work…