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Tendon-driven underactuated hands excel in adaptive grasping but often suffer from kinematic unpredictability and highly non-linear force transmission. This ambiguity limits their ability to perform precise free-motion shaping and deliver…
Humanoid robots rely on multi-contact planners to navigate a diverse set of environments, including those that are unstructured and highly constrained. To synthesize stable multi-contact plans within a reasonable time frame, most planners…
Robotic surface-interaction tasks, such as spray painting or welding, require both accurate geometric planning and precise motion execution. While modern motion planners generate valid geometric paths, they often lack the expert motor…
Autonomous motion planning under unknown nonlinear dynamics requires learning system properties while navigating toward a target. In this work, we develop a hierarchical planning-control framework that enables online motion synthesis with…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
Purpose - Skullbase surgery demands exceptional precision when removing bone in the lateral skull base. Robotic assistance can alleviate the effect of human sensory-motor limitations. However, the stiffness and inertia of the robot can…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Efficient tabletop rearrangement remains challenging due to collisions and the need for temporary buffering when target poses are obstructed. Prehensile pick-and-place provides precise control but often requires extra moves, whereas…
With the goal of enabling the exploitation of impacts in robotic manipulation, a new framework is presented for control of robotic manipulators that are tasked to execute nominally simultaneous impacts. In this framework, we employ tracking…
Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable'…
Physics-based manipulation in clutter involves complex interaction between multiple objects. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning, from interaction in a physics simulator, manipulation skills to solve this multi-step…
Cloth manipulation is a category of deformable object manipulation of great interest to the robotics community, from applications of automated laundry-folding and home organizing and cleaning to textiles and flexible manufacturing. Despite…
The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with…
Constraint-based control approaches offer a flexible way to specify robotic manipulation tasks and execute them on robots with many degrees of freedom. However, the specification of task constraints and their associated priorities usually…
We present an approach to robotic manipulation of unknown objects through regulation of the object's contact configuration: the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the object, robot, and environment. A contact configuration…
Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…
To perform complex tasks, robots must be able to interact with and manipulate their surroundings. One of the key challenges in accomplishing this is robust state estimation during physical interactions, where the state involves not only the…
In this work, we introduce a framework that enables highly maneuverable locomotion using non-periodic contacts. This task is challenging for traditional optimization and planning methods to handle due to difficulties in specifying contact…
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…