7 accepted papers
The term safety in robotics is often understood as a synonym for avoidance. Although this perspective has led to progress in path planning and reactive control, a generalization of this perspective is necessary to include task semantics relevant to contact-rich manipulation tasks, especially during
Uncertainties in contact dynamics and object geometry remain significant barriers to robust robotic manipulation. Caging helps mitigate these uncertainties by constraining an object’s mobility without requiring precise contact modeling. Existing caging research often treats morphology and policy opt
Useful robot control algorithms should not only achieve performance objectives but also adhere to hard safety constraints. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have been developed to provably ensure system safety through forward invariance. However, they often unnecessarily sacrifice performance for saf
Velocity Obstacles (VO) methods form a paradigm for collision avoidance strategies among moving obstacles and agents. While VO methods perform well in simple multi-agent environments, they do not guarantee safety and can show overly conservative behavior in common situations. In this paper, we propo
The basis for robotics skill learning is an adequate representation of manipulation tasks based on their physical properties. As manipulation tasks are inherently invariant to the choice of reference frame, an ideal task representation would also exhibit this property. Nevertheless, most robotic lea…
Shared-autonomy control strategies in teleoperation combine human decision-making and robot precision to solve complex tasks. In other words, advanced autonomous control algorithms can compensate for imprecise human commands, reduce the mental workload of the user, and enable the execution of tasks…
This paper is about fast slosh-free fluid transportation. Existing approaches are either computationally heavy or only suitable for specific robots and container shapes. We model the end effector as a point mass suspended by a spherical pendulum and study the requirements for slosh-free motion and t…