20 accepted papers
Model-predictive control (MPC) is a state-of-the-art control method for constrained robotic systems, yet deployment on resource-limited hardware remains difficult. This challenge is magnified by expressive conic constraints, which offer greater modeling power but require significantly more computati…
While Model Predictive Control (MPC) delivers strong performance across robotics applications, solving the underlying (batches of) nonlinear trajectory optimization (TO) problems online remains computationally demanding. Existing GPU-accelerated approaches either parallelize single solves, handle la…
Sampling-based motion planning algorithms, like the Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT) and its widely used variant, RRT-Connect, provide efficient solutions for high-dimensional planning problems faced by real-world robots. However, these methods remain computationally intensive, particularly in co…
Mobile robots demand power efficiency as well as accuracy and high performance in their computations. Embedded microcontrollers and FPGAs can consume as much as <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1000\
Mobile robots demand power efficiency as well as accuracy and high performance in their computations. Embedded microcontrollers and FPGAs, which can consume as much as 1000x less power than large CPUs and GPUs, offer a promising solution to these power needs. However, these power-efficient platforms…
Coordinating emergency responses in extreme environments, such as wildfires, requires resilient and high-bandwidth communication backbones. While autonomous aerial swarms can establish ad-hoc networks to provide this connectivity, the high risk of individual node attrition in these settings often le
Accurate online inertial parameter estimation is essential for adaptive robotic control, enabling real-time adjustment to payload changes, environmental interactions, and system wear. Traditional methods often struggle to track abrupt parameter shifts or incur high computational costs, limiting thei…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) provides a principled framework for convex relaxations of nonconvex geometric constraints in motion planning, yet existing solvers are too computationally expensive for real-time control, particularly on resource-constrained embedded systems. To address this gap, we in…
Recent advances in Model Predictive Control (MPC) leveraging a combination of first-order methods, such as the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), and offline precomputation and caching of select operations, have excitingly enabled real-time MPC on microcontrollers. Unfortunately, th
We present Phaser, a flexible system that directs narrow-beam laser light to moving robots for concurrent wireless power delivery and communication. We design a semiautomatic calibration procedure to enable fusion of stereo-vision-based 3D robot tracking with high-power beam steering, and a low-powe
Perceptive deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has lead to many recent breakthroughs for complex AI systems leveraging image-based input data. Applications of these results range from super-human level video game agents to dexterous, physically intelligent robots. However, training these perceptive DR…
Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is a state-of-the-art approach for locomotion and manipulation which leverages trajectory optimization at each control step. While the performance of this approach is computationally bounded, implementations of direct trajectory optimization that use iterati…
We introduce RobotPerf, a vendor-agnostic bench-marking suite designed to evaluate robotics computing performance across a diverse range of hardware platforms using ROS 2 as its common baseline. The suite encompasses ROS 2 packages covering the full robotics pipeline and integrates two distinct benc…
There has been a growing interest in parallel strategies for solving trajectory optimization problems. One key step in many algorithmic approaches to trajectory optimization is the solution of moderately-large and sparse linear systems. Iterative methods are particularly well-suited for parallel sol…
Model-predictive control (MPC) is a powerful tool for controlling highly dynamic robotic systems subject to complex constraints. However, MPC is computationally demanding, and is often impractical to implement on small, resource-constrained robotic platforms. We present TinyMPC, a high-speed MPC sol…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the most powerful tools for synthesizing complex robotic behaviors. But training DRL models is incredibly compute and memory intensive, requiring large training datasets and replay buffers to achieve performant results. This poses a challenge for the next…
We introduce GRiD: a GPU-accelerated library for computing rigid body dynamics with analytical gradients. GRiD was designed to accelerate the nonlinear trajectory opti-mization subproblem used in state-of-the-art robotic planning, control, and machine learning, which requires tens to hundreds of nat…
Hardware acceleration can revolutionize robotics, enabling new applications by speeding up robot response times while remaining power-efficient. However, the diversity of acceleration options makes it difficult for roboticists to easily deploy accelerated systems without expertise in each specific h…
Computing the gradient of rigid body dynamics is a central operation in many state-of-the-art planning and control algorithms in robotics. Parallel computing platforms such as GPUs and FPGAs can offer performance gains for algorithms with hardware-compatible computational structures. In this letter,
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) has become a popular approach to performing trajectory optimization for complex, underactuated robots. However, DDP presents two practical challenges. First, the evaluation of dynamics derivatives during optimization creates a computational bottleneck, particul…