10 accepted papers
This letter considers an augmented kinematic formulation for nonprehensile manipulation through intermittent contacts as occurring in catching, batting, or juggling. In such scenarios, the contact point with an end-effector is variable, which we propose to model with additional virtual joints at the
Reinforcement learning has become more and more popular in robotics for acquiring feedback controllers. Many approaches aim for learning a controller from scratch, i.e., data-driven without any modeling of the physical plant. However, stability properties of the closed loop are often not considered,…
The objective of this letter is to develop a data-driven model of laser intensities and investigate its usage for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in the field of robotics. In contrast to the standard usage of laser scanners in SLAM to generate geometric models of the environment, the re
This paper introduces an online motion planning algorithm and a motion generation methodology for underactuated dynamic planar walking on uneven terrain. The key idea is to utilize a database of Motion Primitives and use them as training examples in a regression methodology, which is utilized when t
This paper presents an extension of the standard occupancy grid for 3D environment mapping. The presented approach adds a fusion process after the occupancy update which modifies the resolution of the grid cells in an incremental manner. Consequently, the proposed approach requires fewer grid cells…
In this paper we propose to track online computed force trajectories to control the energy of various types of pendulum-like objects. The considered pendulum-like objects can be controlled by multiple agents and swing in different oscillation degrees of freedom. Our goal is to excite one specific os…
This paper discusses an online dynamic motion generation scheme for nonprehensile object manipulation by using a set of predefined motions and a trajectory deformation algorithm capable of incorporating positional and velocity boundary constraints. By creating optimal trajectories offline and deform…
One of the key challenges in dynamic manipulation is to establish continuous contact between a moving object and a manipulator. Direct robotic catching is a benchmark in this context, especially without grasping devices. In this paper, we explain why it is unrewarding to aim for an ideal initial dyn…
Throwing an object by a powered robot system is of great importance in unmanned environments. In this paper, we consider the problem of throwing a point-mass object to minimize uncertainty in the object's landing position, given uncertainty in (1) the robot's initial configuration and (2) friction a…
This paper introduces a novel way to improve the settling time of transitions between different walking controllers. This improvement is achieved by commanding a sequence of intermediate transitions to the target controller. As a result, the state of the system enters the domain of attraction of the…