17 accepted papers
Omnidirectional robots can be realized using Mecanum wheels or using a suitable arrangement of conventional steerable wheels. The latter group, known as omnidirectional steerable wheeled mobile robots (SWMRs), are known to have a lower cost with respect to the former, and to be more robust thanks to
Fine dexterous manipulation requires reactive control based on rich sensing of manipulator-object interactions. Tactile sensing arrays provide rich contact information across the manipulator’s surface. However their implementation faces two main challenges: accurate force estimation across complex s
In agricultural robotics, effective observation and localization of fruits present challenges due to occlusions caused by other parts of the tree, such as branches and leaves. These occlusions can result in false fruit localization or impede the robot from picking the fruit. The objective of this wo…
Human physical assistance requires the assistant to tune both his trajectory and impedance in order to assist an individual as well as be guided by him. In this study we propose a controller for teleoperated human assistance that allows the assistant to guide the assisting robot in both trajectory a…
Humans use contacts in the environment to modify the shape of deformable objects. Yet, few papers have studied the use of contacts in robotic manipulation. In this letter, we investigate the problem of robotic manipulation of cables with environmental contacts. Instead of avoiding contacts, we propo
This letter considers the problem of collision-free navigation of omnidirectional mobile robots in environments with obstacles. Information from a monocular camera, encoders, and an inertial measurement unit is used to achieve the task. Three different visual servoing control schemes, compatible wit
To make production lines more flexible, dual-arm robots are good candidates to be deployed in autonomous assembly units. In this paper, we propose a sparse kinematic control strategy, that minimizes the number of joints actuated for a coordinated task between two arms. The control strategy is based…
Deforming a cable to a desired (reachable) shape is a trivial task for a human to do without even knowing the internal dynamics of the cable. This paper proposes a framework for cable shapes manipulation with multiple robot manipulators. The shape is parameterized by a Fourier series. A local deform…
For successful physical human-robot interaction, the capability of a robot to understand its environment is imperative. More importantly, the robot should extract from the human operator as much information as possible. A reliable 3D skeleton extraction is essential for a robot to predict the intent…
This paper represents a step towards vision-based manipulation of plastic materials. Manipulating deformable objects is made challenging by: 1) the absence of a model for the object deformation, 2) the inherent difficulty of visual tracking of deformable objects, 3) the difficulty in defining a visu…
In this paper, we present a control strategy that enables intuitive physical human-robot collaboration with mobile manipulators equipped with an omnidirectional base. When interacting with a human operator, intuitiveness of operation is a major concern. To this end, we propose a redundancy solution…
Steerable wheeled mobile robots are able to perform arbitrary three-dimensional (3-D) planar trajectories, only after initializing the steer joint vector to the proper values. These robots employ fully steerable conventional wheels. Hence, they have higher load carrying capacity than their holonomic
This paper presents a tentacle-based obstacle avoidance scheme for omnidirectional mobile robots that must satisfy visibility constraints during navigation. The navigation task consists of driving the robot towards a visual target in the presence of environment (static or moving) obstacles. The targ…
In human-robot interaction, the robot must behave safely, especially when an operator is present in its workspace. Even higher safety levels must be attained when physical contact occurs between the two. To this end, standards such as the ISO10218 define the requirements for a robot to be considered
Non-holonomic omnidirectional mobile robots have higher load carrying capacity than their holonomic counterparts. Once the steer joint configuration is initialized, they can perform arbitrarily complex three-dimensional trajectories in the plane of motion and, as such, are more suitable for industri
This paper is about the design of humanoid walking pattern generators to be used for physical collaboration. A particular use case is a humanoid robot helping a human to carry large and/or heavy objects. To do this, we construct a reduced model which takes into account physical interaction. This is
This paper presents a framework to embody a user (e.g. disabled persons) into a humanoid robot controlled by means of brain-computer interfaces (BCI). With our framework, the robot can interact with the environment, or assist its user. The low frequency and accuracy of the BCI commands is compensate…