15 accepted papers
When robots enter our day-to-day lives, the shared space surrounding humans and robots is critical for facilitating Human-Robot collaboration. The design of shared space should satisfy humans' preferences and robots' efficiency. This work uses the kitchen as an example to illustrate the importance o
This paper investigates how a shepherd robot can efficiently steer a coherent group by intelligently moving behind the group in obstacle-filled environments. It was been shown that a model trained by deep reinforcement learning can guide a small number (2–4) of agents among obstacles. However, herdi…
When the human-robot interactions become ubiquitous, the environment surrounding these interactions will have significant impact on the safety and comfort of the human and the effectiveness and efficiency of the robot. Although most robots are designed to work in the spaces created for humans, many
Robotic shepherding problem considers the control and navigation of a group of coherent agents (e.g., a flock of bird or a fleet of drones) through the motion of an external robot, called shepherd. Machine learning based methods have successfully solved this problem in an environment with no obstacl
Most consumer-level low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have limited battery power and long charging time. Thus, they cannot accomplish some practical tasks such as providing service to cover an area for an extended time, also known as persistent covering. Algorithmic approaches are limited mos
Designing a robot or structure that can fold into a target shape is a process that involves challenges originated from multiple sources. For example, the designer of self-folding robots must consider foldability from geometric and kinematic aspects to avoid self-collisions and undesired deformations…
Visibility integrity (VI) is a measurement of similarity between the visibilities of regions. It can be used to approximate the visibility of coherently moving targets, called group visibility. It has been shown that computing visibility integrity using agglomerative clustering takes O(n4 log n) for
Recent innovations enable robots to be manufactured using low-cost planar active material and self-folded into 3D structures. The current practice for designing such structures often uses two decoupled steps: generating an unfolding (called net) from a 3D shape and then finding the collision-free fo…
The ability to edit materials of objects in images is desirable by many content creators. However, this is an extremely challenging task as it requires to disentangle intrinsic physical properties of an image. We propose an end-to-end network architecture that replicates the forward image formation…
In this work, we propose a new type of visibility measurement named Continuous Visibility Feature (CVF). We say that a point q on the mesh is continuously visible from another point p if there exists a geodesic path connecting p and q that is entirely visible by p. In order to efficiently estimate t…
Cut along the surface of a polyhedron and unfold it to a planar structure without overlapping is known as Unfolding Polyhedra problem which has been extensively studied in the mathematics literature for centuries. However, whether there exists a continuous unfolding motion such that the polyhedron c…
Maintaining clearance, or distance from obstacles and sampling efficient enough configurations on the medial axises are a vital component for successful motion planning. Maintaining high clearance often creates safer paths for robots. Having bias for sampling on medial axis also offers higher possib…
Recent advances in robotics engineering have enabled the realization of self-folding machines. Rigid origami is usually used as the underlying model for the self-folding machines whose surface remains rigid during folding except at joints. A key issue in designing rigid origami is foldability that c…
Self-folding robot is usually modeled as rigid origami, a class of origami whose entire surface remains rigid during folding except at crease lines. In this work, we focus on finding valid folding motion that brings the origami from the unfolded state continuously to the folded state. Although recen…
The problem of image based localization has a long history both in robotics and computer vision and shares many similarities with image based retrieval problem. Existing techniques use either local features or (semi)-global image signatures in the context of topological mapping or loop closure detec…