10 accepted papers
Visual inspection of confined spaces such as aircraft wings is ergonomically challenging for human mechanics. This work presents a novel crane robot that can travel the entire span of the aircraft wing, enabling mechanics to perform inspection from outside of the confined space. However, teleoperati…
One of the goals of active information acquisition using multi-robot teams is to keep the relative uncertainty in each region at the same level to maintain identical acquisition quality (e.g., consistent target detection) in all the regions. To achieve this goal, ergodic coverage can be used to assi…
Visual inspection of confined spaces such as aircraft wings is ergonomically challenging for human mechanics. This work presents a novel crane robot that can travel the entire span of the aircraft wing, enabling mechanics to perform inspection from outside of the confined space. However, teleoperati
The success of the model predictive path integral control (MPPI) approach depends on the appropriate selection of the input distribution used for sampling. However, it can be challenging to select inputs that satisfy output constraints in dynamic environments. The main contribution of this paper is…
This letter addresses the rapid transport of flexible objects without increasing deformation, from one position to another, using a decentralized robotic team, rather than using a single large robot. However, current decentralized control theories do not ensure that the robot responses will remain c
Confined space manufacturing tasks, such as cleaning pilot holes prior to installing fasteners during aircraft wing assembly, currently require human experts to be inside ergonomically-challenging environments. Small rapidly deployable robots can substantially improve manufacturing safety and produc
Efficient utilization of cooperating robots in the assembly of aircraft structures relies on balancing the workload of the robots and ensuring collision-free scheduling. We cast this problem as that of allocating a large number of repetitive assembly tasks, such as drilling holes and installing fast
Automated real-time prediction of the ergonomic risks of manipulating objects is a key unsolved challenge in developing effective human-robot collaboration systems for logistics and manufacturing applications. We present a foundational paradigm to address this challenge by formulating the problem as
Learning motion primitives from demonstration requires the human demonstrator to effectively relay the task intent to the robot controller. When the task intent is not reflected sufficiently by the demonstration, multiple iterations are required to recover the underlying intent of the demonstrations…
This article studies imitation learning policies that encode task compliance to provide teleoperation assistance for remote manufacturing. The central challenge is how to handle off-nominal situations, such as out-of-sequence work or unplanned obstacles, since the assistance has not been trained to…