12 accepted papers
Exploiting the promise of recent advances in imitation learning for mobile manipulation will require the collection of large numbers of human-guided demonstrations. This paper proposes an open-source design for an inexpensive, robust, and flexible mobile manipulator that can support arbitrary arms,…
Programming paths for robotic welding conventionally requires precise positioning of workpieces, detailed 3D models and/or tedious teach pendant programming. A new method is introduced in this paper that enables an operator to teach the weld path to the robot through a haptic-visual interface. The o…
Hard coded robotic manipulation skills work well in known, predictable and repeatable situations. Human environments, however, are better described as dynamic, chaotic, uncertain or unstructured. Therefore, plans relying on preprogrammed trajectories are bound to fail in these settings. In order to…
Robots have been successfully used in well-structured and deterministic environments, but they are still unable to function in unstructured environments mainly because of missing reliable real-time systems that integrate perception and control. In this paper, we close the loop between perception and…
To achieve a successful grasp, gripper attributes such as its geometry and kinematics play a role as important as the object geometry. The majority of previous work has focused on developing grasp methods that generalize over novel object geometry but are specific to a certain robot hand. We propose
When performing tasks in uncertain environments and around humans, robots are likely to collide unexpectedly with people or objects. In order to ensure safety, most approaches rely on collision avoidance and try to prevent any contact from happening, which may result in unnecessary interruption of a…
In this paper, we demonstrate that it is feasible to conduct reliable multi-axis force control motor neuroimaging experiments in humans using a novel five degree-of-freedom Haptic fMRI interface (HFI-5). We demonstrate that HFI-5 supports accurate force and torque control for all its axes. In additi…
This paper extends the previously proposed Explicit Force Controller based on Time Domain Passivity Approach. When using the classical passivity observer, we encounter an energy accumulation problem: if the system stays a long time in stable contact, energy is dissipated and the passivity observer b…
Direct force control of robots is challenging, particularly since the interaction with the environment can render the robot unstable. This paper presents the results of novel approaches for passivity-based stability for a particular direct force control method, namely explicit force control. A step-…
This paper presents the contact-consistent elastic strips (CES) framework, a motion planning approach capable of producing complex multi-contact whole-body humanoid behaviors in dynamic environments. Planning multi-contact motions for humanoid robots is known to be non-trivial since it involves aspe…
For intelligent robots to solve real-world tasks, they need to manipulate multiple objects, and perform diverse manipulation actions apart from rigid transfers, such as pushing and sliding. Planning these tasks requires discrete changes between actions, and continuous, collision-free paths that fulf…
We present a light, actuated smart staff with 5DOF tip force sensing which can be used by a humanoid robot operating in challenging terrain. The staff has an extension mechanism that employs mechanical multiplexing to achieve a high extension ratio in a stiff and compact package. The tip force senso…