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Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for robot planning and feedback control. It is characterized by underactuation, hybrid control, and contact uncertainty.
The paper introduces the novel Modular Pipe Climber III with a Three-Output Open Differential (3-OOD) mechanism to eliminate slipping of the tracks due to the changing cross-sections of the pipe. This will be achieved in any orientation of the robot.
Taking over arbitrary tasks like humans do with a mobile service robot in open-world settings requires a holistic scene perception for decision-making and high-level control. This paper presents a human-inspired scene perception model to minimize the gap between human and robotic capabilities.
Teleoperation can transfer human perception and cognition to a slave robot to cope with some complex tasks, in which the agility and flexibility of the interface play an important role in mapping human intention to the robot. In this paper, we developed an agile large-workspace teleoperation interface by estimating hu...
We study a problem of multi-agent exploration with behaviorally heterogeneous robots. Each robot maps its surroundings using SLAM and identifies a set of areas of interest (AoIs) or frontiers that are the most informative to explore next.
Absolute position accuracy is the key performance criterion of an Indoor Localization System (ILS). Since ILS are heterogeneous and complex cyber-physical systems, the localization accuracy depends on various influences from the environment, system configuration, and the application processes.
This research addresses the increasing demand for advanced navigation systems capable of operating within confined surroundings. A significant challenge in this field is developing an efficient planning framework that can generalize across various types of collision avoidance missions.
Localization in challenging, natural environments such as forests or woodlands is an important capability for many applications from guiding a robot navigating along a forest trail to monitoring vegetation growth with handheld sensors. In this work we explore laser-based localization in both urban and natural environm...
It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities of the environment.
In this paper, we give a double twist to the problem of planning under uncertainty. State-of-the-art planners seek to minimize the localization uncertainty by only considering the geometric structure of the scene.
The objective of this study is improving the location estimate of a mobile robot capable of motion on a plane and mounted with a conventional 2D LIDAR sensor, given an initial guess for its location on a 2D map of its surroundings. Documented herein is the theoretical reasoning behind solving a matching problem betwee...
An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in real-world environments, where constraint violations can harm the agent and the...
We investigate the sequential manipulation planning problem for unmanned aerial manipulators (UAMs). Unlike prior work that primarily focuses on one-step manipulation tasks, sequential manipulations require coordinated motions of a UAM's floating base, the manipulator, and the object being manipulated, entailing a...
Industrial robots are designed as general-purpose hardware with limited ability to adapt to changing task requirements or environments. Modular robots, on the other hand, offer flexibility and can be easily customized to suit diverse needs.
We present an approach for radar-inertial odometry which uses a continuous-time framework to fuse measurements from multiple automotive radars and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Adverse weather conditions do not have a significant impact on the operating performance of radar sensors unlike that of camera and LiDA...
Accurately perceiving an object's pose and shape is essential for precise grasping and manipulation. Compared to common vision-based methods, tactile sensing offers advantages in precision and immunity to occlusion when tracking and reconstructing objects in contact.
This paper proposes an eco-driving framework for electric connected vehicles (CVs) based on reinforcement learning (RL) to improve vehicle energy efficiency at signalized intersections. The vehicle agent is specified by integrating the model-based car-following policy, lane-changing policy, and the RL policy, to ensur...
Driverless road maintenance could potentially be highly beneficial to all its stakeholders, with the key goals being increased safety for all road participants, more efficient traffic management, and reduced road maintenance costs such that the standard of the road infrastructure is sufficient for it to be used in Auto...
Mobile robots are becoming increasingly important both for individuals and industries. Mobile robotic technology is not only utilised by experts in this field but is also very popular among amateurs.
This work presents a novel RGB-D SLAM approach to simultaneously segment, track and reconstruct the static background and large dynamic rigid objects that can occlude major portions of the camera view. Previous approaches treat dynamic parts of a scene as outliers and are thus limited to a small amount of changes in t...
With the introduction of the laterally bounded forces, the tilt-rotor gains more flexibility in the controller design. Typical feedback linearization methods utilize all the inputs in controlling this vehicle; the magnitudes as well as the directions of the thrusts are maneuvered simultaneously based on a unified cont...
The strength of the human hand lies in its ability to manipulate small objects precisely and robustly. In contrast, simple robotic grippers have low dexterity and fail to handle small objects effectively.
Inverse dynamics is used extensively in robotics and biomechanics applications. In manipulator and legged robots, it can form the basis of an effective nonlinear control strategy by providing a robot with both accurate positional tracking and active compliance.
Robotic catching has traditionally focused on single-handed systems, which are limited in their ability to handle larger or more complex objects. In contrast, bimanual catching offers significant potential for improved dexterity and object handling but introduces new challenges in coordination and control.
This paper addresses the problem of contact-based manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) towards desired shapes with a dual-arm robotic system. To alleviate the burden of high-dimensional continuous state-action spaces, we model the DLO as a kinematic multibody system via our proposed keypoint detection netw...
In robotics, it is often not possible to learn useful policies using pure model-free reinforcement learning without significant reward shaping or curriculum learning. As a consequence, many researchers rely on expert demonstrations to guide learning.
Modern agricultural applications require knowledge about the position and size of fruits on plants. However, occlusions from leaves typically make obtaining this information difficult.
With the rapid development of the construction industry, issues such as harsh working environments, high-intensity and high-risk tasks, and labor shortages have become increasingly prominent. This drives higher demands for construction robots in terms of low energy consumption, high mobility, and high load capacity.
Modern robotics is gravitating toward increasingly collaborative human robot interaction. Tools such as acceleration policies can naturally support the realization of reactive, adaptive, and compliant robots.
Persons with visual impairments (PwVI) have difficulties understanding and navigating spaces around them. Current wayfinding technologies either focus solely on navigation or provide limited communication about the environment.
3D Multi-object tracking (MOT) empowers mobile robots to accomplish well-informed motion planning and navigation tasks by providing motion trajectories of surrounding objects. However, existing 3D MOT methods typically employ a single similarity metric and physical model to perform data association and state estimatio...
A generic architecture for a class of distributed robotic systems is presented. The architecture supports openness and heterogeneity, i.e. heterogeneous components may be joined and removed from the systems without affecting its basic functionality.
Unprecedented agility and dexterous manipulation have been demonstrated with controllers based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), with a significant impact on legged and humanoid robots. Modern tooling and simulation platforms, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, have been enabling such advances.
Bipedal robots do not perform well as humans since they do not learn to walk like we do. In this paper we propose a method to train a bipedal robot to perform some basic movements with the help of imitation learning (IL) in which an instructor will perform the movement and the robot will try to mimic the instructor mo...
An essential need for many model-based robot control algorithms is the ability to quickly and accurately compute partial derivatives of the equations of motion. State of the art approaches to this problem often use analytical methods based on the chain rule applied to existing dynamics algorithms.
Physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is widely needed in many fields, such as industrial manipulation, home services, and medical rehabilitation, and puts higher demands on the safety of robots. Due to the uncertainty of the working environment, the pHRI may receive unexpected impact interference, which affects the...
Daily tasks require us to use our whole body to manipulate objects, for instance when our hands are unavailable. We consider the issue of providing humanoid robots with the ability to autonomously perform similar whole-body manipulation tasks.
Tactile sensors have been used for force estimation in the past, especially Vision-Based Tactile Sensors (VBTS) have recently become a new trend due to their high spatial resolution and low cost. In this work, we have designed and implemented several approaches to estimate the normal grasping force using different typ...
This paper presents an open-source miniature car-like robot with low-cost sensing and a pipeline for optimization-based system identification, state estimation, and control. The overall robotics platform comes at a cost of less than \$\,700 and thus significantly simplifies the verification of advanced algorithms in a...
We present Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning (McARL), a new approach to overcome challenges of hyperparameter tuning and transfer loss, enabling generalizable locomotion across robot morphologies. We use a morphology-conditioned policy by incorporating a randomized morphology vector, sampled from a defin...
This paper explores the expressive capabilities of a swarm of miniature mobile robots within the context of inter-robot interactions and their mapping to the so-called fundamental emotions. In particular, we investigate how motion and shape descriptors that are psychologically associated with different emotions can be...
The ability to manipulate objects in a desired configurations is a fundamental requirement for robots to complete various practical applications. While certain goals can be achieved by picking and placing the objects of interest directly, object reorientation is needed for precise placement in most of the tasks.
The safe trajectory planning of intelligent and connected vehicles is a key component in autonomous driving technology. Modeling the environment risk information by field is a promising and effective approach for safe trajectory planning.
Transferring human motion to a mobile robotic manipulator and ensuring safe physical human-robot interaction are crucial steps towards automating complex manipulation tasks in human-shared environments. In this work, we present a novel human to robot whole-body motion transfer framework.
We propose a closed-loop, multi-instance control algorithm for visually guided reaching based on novel learning principles. A control Lyapunov function methodology is used to design a reaching action for a complex multi-instance task in the case where full state information (poses of all potential reaching points) is ...
Contact-rich manipulation in unstructured environments demands precise, multimodal perception to enable robust and adaptive control. Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) have emerged as an effective solution; however, conventional VBTSs often face challenges in achieving compact, multi-modal functionality due to hardw...
Human-robot interaction requires robots to process language incrementally, adapting their actions in real-time based on evolving speech input. Existing approaches to language-guided robot motion planning typically assume fully specified instructions, resulting in inefficient stop-and-replan behavior when corrections o...
Cooperative multi-agent problems often require coordination between agents, which can be achieved through a centralized policy that considers the global state. Multi-agent policy gradient (MAPG) methods are commonly used to learn such policies, but they are often limited to problems with low-level action spaces.
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into robotic control, including drones, has the potential to revolutionize autonomous systems. Research studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be leveraged to support robotic operations.
It is typically challenging for visual or visual-inertial odometry systems to handle the problems of dynamic scenes and pure rotation. In this work, we design a novel visual-inertial odometry (VIO) system called RD-VIO to handle both of these two problems.
Many day-to-day activities require the dexterous manipulation of a redundant humanoid arm in complex 3D environments. However, position regulation of such robot arm systems becomes very difficult in presence of non-linear uncertainties in the system.
This paper presents T3: Transferable Tactile Transformers, a framework for tactile representation learning that scales across multi-sensors and multi-tasks. T3 is designed to overcome the contemporary issue that camera-based tactile sensing is extremely heterogeneous, i.e. sensors are built into different form factors...
Mind perception in robots has been an understudied construct in human-robot interaction (HRI) compared to similar concepts such as anthropomorphism and the intentional stance. In a series of three experiments, we identify two factors that could potentially influence mind perception and moral concern in robots: how the...
We present a novel reinforcement learning (RL) based task allocation and decentralized navigation algorithm for mobile robots in warehouse environments. Our approach is designed for scenarios in which multiple robots are used to perform various pick up and delivery tasks.
Mapping with uncertainty representation is required in many research domains, especially for localization. Although there are many investigations regarding the uncertainty of the pose estimation of an ego-robot with map information, the quality of the reference maps is often neglected.
A key challenge in robotics is to create efficient methods for grasping objects with diverse shapes, sizes, poses, and properties. Grasping with hand-like end effectors often requires careful selection of hand orientation and finger placement.
This paper presents a sampling-based motion planning framework that leverages the geometry of obstacles in a workspace as well as prior experiences from motion planning problems. Previous studies have demonstrated the benefits of utilizing prior solutions to motion planning problems for improving planning efficiency.
The fusion of Large Language Models (LLMs) and robotic systems has led to a transformative paradigm in the robotic field, offering unparalleled capabilities not only in the communication domain but also in skills like multimodal input handling, high-level reasoning, and plan generation. The grounding of LLMs knowledge...
SLAM has matured significantly over the past few years, and is beginning to appear in serious commercial products. While new SLAM systems are being proposed at every conference, evaluation is often restricted to qualitative visualizations or accuracy estimation against a ground truth.
In this work we developed a mathematical model and a simulation platform for a fish-inspired robotic template, namely Magnetic, Modular, Undulatory Robotics ($\mu$Bots). Through this platform, we systematically explored the effects of design and fluid parameters on the swimming performance via reinforcement learning.
Tensegrity mechanisms are composed of rigid and tensile parts that are in equilibrium. They are interesting alternative designs for some applications, such as modelling musculo-skeleton systems.
Deep learning, with its exceptional learning capabilities and flexibility, has been widely applied in various applications. However, its black-box nature poses a significant challenge in real-time robotic applications, particularly in robot control, where trustworthiness and robustness are critical in ensuring safety....
Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies, especially for complex multi-fingered humanoids, remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on extensive data collection and imitation learning, which are expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale.
Training deep neural network policies end-to-end for real-world applications so far requires big demonstration datasets in the real world or big sets consisting of a large variety of realistic and closely related 3D CAD models. These real or virtual data should, moreover, have very similar characteristics to the condi...
Robots existed as separate entities till now, but the horizons of a symbiotic human-robot partnership are impending. Despite all the recent technical advances in terms of hardware, robots are still not endowed with desirable relational skills that ensure a social component in their existence.
Tracking objects in three-dimensional space is critical for autonomous driving. To ensure safety while driving, the tracker must be able to reliably track objects across frames and accurately estimate their states such as velocity and acceleration in the present.
We present an unsupervised framework for simultaneous appearance-based object discovery, detection, tracking and reconstruction using RGBD cameras and a robot manipulator. The system performs dense 3D simultaneous localization and mapping concurrently with unsupervised object discovery.
In the paper, we show how scalable, low-cost trunk-like robotic arms can be constructed using only basic 3D-printing equipment and simple electronics. The design is based on uniform, stackable joint modules with three degrees of freedom each.
In Social Robot Navigation (SRN), the availability of meaningful metrics is crucial for evaluating trajectories from human-robot interactions. In the SRN context, such interactions often relate to resolving conflicts between two or more agents.
With the substantial growth of logistics businesses the need for larger and more automated warehouses increases, thus giving rise to fully robotized shop-floors with mobile robots in charge of transporting and distributing goods. However, even in fully automatized warehouse systems the need for human intervention freq...
Traversability estimation in off-road terrains is an essential procedure for autonomous navigation. However, creating reliable labels for complex interactions between the robot and the surface is still a challenging problem in learning-based costmap generation.
Space robotics poses unique challenges arising from the limitation of energy and computational resources, and the complexity of the environment and employed platforms. At the control center, offline motion planning is fundamental in the computation of optimized trajectories accounting for the system's constraints....
It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely fast escape responses when a predator is sensed by performing explosive curved j...
In this paper, we introduce GS-LIVM, a real-time photo-realistic LiDAR-Inertial-Visual mapping framework with Gaussian Splatting tailored for outdoor scenes. Compared to existing methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), our approach enables real-time photo-realistic mapping whil...
Autonomous terrain traversal of articulated tracked robots can reduce operator cognitive load to enhance task efficiency and facilitate extensive deployment. We present a novel hybrid trajectory optimization method aimed at generating efficient, stable, and smooth traversal motions.
Gastrointestinal endoscopic surgery (GES) has high requirements for instruments' size and distal dexterity, because of the narrow endoscopic channel and long, tortuous human gastrointestinal tract. This paper utilized Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) wires to develop a miniature 3-DoF (pitch-yaw-translation) flexible parall...
In this paper the design of a control system for a biped robot is described. Control is specified for a walk cycle of the robot.
Segmentation and tracking of unseen object instances in discrete frames pose a significant challenge in dynamic industrial robotic contexts, such as distribution warehouses. Here, robots must handle object rearrangement, including shifting, removal, and partial occlusion by new items, and track these items after subst...
Autonomous robots in unstructured and dynamically changing retail environments have to master complex perception, knowledgeprocessing, and manipulation tasks. To enable them to act competently, we propose a framework based on three core components: (o) a knowledge-enabled perception system, capable of combining divers...
We present an approach to task scheduling in heterogeneous multi-robot systems. In our setting, the tasks to complete require diverse skills.
This paper considers the problem of safely coordinating a team of sensor-equipped robots to reduce uncertainty about a dynamical process, where the objective trades off information gain and energy cost. Optimizing this trade-off is desirable, but leads to a non-monotone objective function in the set of robot trajector...
Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Search and rescue operations (SAR) to navigate challenging terrain while maintaining reliable communication with the cellular network is a promising approach. This paper suggests a novel technique employing a reinforcement learning multi Q-learning algorithm to optimize UAV con...
Humanoid robot teleoperation allows humans to integrate their cognitive capabilities with the apparatus to perform tasks that need high strength, manoeuvrability and dexterity. This paper presents a framework for teleoperation of humanoid robots using a novel approach for motion retargeting through inverse kinematics ...
Augmenting the body with artificial limbs controlled concurrently to the natural limbs has long appeared in science fiction, but recent technological and neuroscientific advances have begun to make this vision possible. By allowing individuals to achieve otherwise impossible actions, this movement augmentation could r...
In this paper, a comparison analysis between geometric impedance controls (GICs) derived from two different potential functions on SE(3) for robotic manipulators is presented. The first potential function is defined on the Lie group, utilizing the Frobenius norm of the configuration error matrix.
This paper proposes an efficient hybrid localization framework for the autonomous navigation of an unmanned ground vehicle in uneven or rough terrain, as well as techniques for detailed processing of 3D point cloud data. The framework is an extended version of FAST-LIO2 algorithm aiming at robust localization in known...
Current technological advances open up new opportunities for bringing human-machine interaction to a new level of human-centered cooperation. In this context, a key issue is the semantic understanding of the environment in order to enable mobile robots more complex interactions and a facilitated communication with hum...
Perception still remains a challenging problem for autonomous navigation in unknown environment, especially for aerial vehicles. Most mapping algorithms for autonomous navigation are specifically designed for their very intended task, which hinders extended usage or cooperative task.
Street Scene Semantic Understanding (denoted as TriSU) is a crucial but complex task for world-wide distributed autonomous driving (AD) vehicles (e.g., Tesla). Its inference model faces poor generalization issue due to inter-city domain-shift.
3D maps are increasingly useful for many applications such as drone navigation, emergency services, and urban planning. However, creating 3D maps and keeping them up-to-date using existing technologies, such as laser scanners, is expensive.
Predicting the behaviors of other agents on the road is critical for autonomous driving to ensure safety and efficiency. However, the challenging part is how to represent the social interactions between agents and output different possible trajectories with interpretability.
In this work, we demonstrate robust walking in the bipedal robot Digit on uneven terrains by just learning a single linear policy. In particular, we propose a new control pipeline, wherein the high-level trajectory modulator shapes the end-foot ellipsoidal trajectories, and the low-level gait controller regulates the ...
Use of robotic infrastructures can significantly increase with remote access. This would open up the possibility to use costly equipment without the need to buy them, or to simply access those assets remotely when actual travel is not possible or recommended - for example in pandemic times.
Understanding a controller's performance in different scenarios is crucial for robots that are going to be deployed in safety-critical tasks. If we do not have a model of the dynamics of the world, which is often the case in complex domains, we may need to approximate a performance function of the robot based on i...
Precise coordinated planning over a forward time window enables safe and highly efficient motion when many robots must work together in tight spaces, but this would normally require centralised control of all devices which is difficult to scale. We demonstrate GBP Planning, a new purely distributed technique based on ...
This work develops and demonstrates the integration of the SCAMP-5d vision system into the CoppeliaSim robot simulator, creating a semi-simulated environment. By configuring a camera in the simulator and setting up communication with the SCAMP python host through remote API, sensor images from the simulator can be tra...
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) has been established as the dominant paradigm for efficiently transferring skills from human teachers to robots. In this context, the Federated Learning (FL) conceptualization has very recently been introduced for developing large-scale human-robot collaborative environments, targetin...
There is a current increase in the development of "4D" Doppler-capable radar and lidar range sensors that produce 3D point clouds where all points also have information about the radial velocity relative to the sensor. 4D radars in particular are interesting for object perception and navigation in low-visibili...
Humans can quickly determine the force required to grasp a deformable object to prevent its sliding or excessive deformation through vision and touch, which is still a challenging task for robots. To address this issue, we propose a novel 3D convolution-based visual-tactile fusion deep neural network (C3D-VTFN) to eva...
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a crucial role in surveying marine environments, carrying out underwater inspection tasks, and ocean exploration. However, in order to ensure that the AUV is able to carry out its mission successfully, a control system capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions ...

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