9 accepted papers
Mobile manipulator robots operating in complex domestic and industrial environments must effectively coordinate their base and arm motions while avoiding obstacles. While current reactive control methods gracefully achieve this coordination, they rely on simplified and idealised geometric representa
The Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the de facto standard middleware in robotics, widely adopted across domains ranging from education to industrial applications. The RoboStack distribution, a conda-based packaging system for ROS, has extended ROS's accessibility by facilitating installation
In this paper, we introduce a pioneering end-to-end system demonstrated on a team of robots and sensors, designed to augment scientific exploration and discovery for human scientists in remote or inaccessible environments. We demonstrate and analyse our system's capability in a mock-up test-bed scen…
We present a reactive base control method that enables high performance mobile manipulation on-the-move in real-world environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Performing manipulation tasks while the mobile base remains in motion can significantly decrease the time required to perform multi-st
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results in developing generalist planning agents for diverse tasks. However, grounding these plans in expansive, multi-floor, and multi-room environments presents a significant challenge for robotics. We introduce SayPlan, a scalable approach…
We present the design and implementation of a taskable reactive mobile manipulation system. In contrary to related work, we treat the arm and base degrees of freedom as a holistic structure which greatly improves the speed and fluidity of the resulting motion. At the core of this approach is a robus
Occlusions caused by a robot’s own body is a common problem for closed-loop control methods employed in eye-to-hand camera setups. We propose an optimization-based reactive controller that minimizes self-occlusions while achieving a desired goal pose. The approach allows coordinated control between
We present NEO, a fast and purely reactive motion controller for manipulators which can avoid static and dynamic obstacles while moving to the desired end-effector pose. Additionally, our controller maximises the manipulability of the robot during the trajectory, while avoiding joint position and ve
For 25 years the Robotics Toolbox for MATLAB® has been used for teaching and research worldwide. This paper describes its successor – the Robotics Toolbox for Python. More than just a port, it takes advantage of popular open-source packages and resources to provide platform portability, fast browser…