5 accepted papers
Autonomous tool manipulation tasks are challenging for robots because they must reason over the tool’s object affordances, how to grasp the tool so it may be used, how the tool will interact with other objects in the environment, and how to perform the complex tool affordances to complete the manipu…
We present the Reflectance Field Map, a reliable real-time method for detecting shiny surfaces, like glass, metal, and mirrors, with lidar. The Reflectance Field Map combines the theory developed for Light Field Mapping, common in computer graphics, with occupancy grid mapping. Like early methods fo…
We present a robot model of early reach and grasp learning, inspired by infant learning without prior knowledge of the geometry, kinematics, or dynamics of the arm. Human infants at reach onset are capable of using a sequence of jerky submotions to bring the hand to the position of a nearby object.…
Fast and high-fidelity dynamic model is very useful for planning, control, and estimation. Here, we present a fixed-time-step, discrete-time dynamic model of differential-drive vehicle with friction for reliable velocity prediction, which is fast, stable, and easy to calibrate. Unlike existing metho…
Here we present a non-holonomic distance function for unicycle-type vehicles, and use this distance function to extend the optimal path planner RRT* to handle nonholonomic constraints. The critical feature of our proposed distance function is that it is also a control-Lyapunov function. We show that…