17 accepted papers
Many humanoid and multi-legged robots are controlled in positions rather than in torques, which prevents direct control of contact forces, and hampers their ability to create multiple contacts to enhance their balance, such as placing a hand on a wall or a handrail. This letter introduces the SEIKO
We address the problem of grasping unknown objects identified from top-down images with a parallel gripper. When no object 3D model is available, the state-of-the-art grasp generators identify the best candidate locations for planar grasps using the RGBD image. However, while they generate the Carte…
Designing controllers for complex robots such as humanoids is not an easy task. Often, researchers hand-tune controllers, but this is a time-consuming approach that yields a single controller which cannot generalize well to varied tasks. This work presents a method which uses the NSGA-II multi-objec…
Grasping made impressive progress during the last few years thanks to deep learning. However, there are many objects for which it is not possible to choose a grasp by only looking at an RGB-D image, might it be for physical reasons (e.g., a hammer with uneven mass distribution) or task constraints (…
Humanoid robots could replace humans in hazardous situations but most of such situations are equally dangerous for them, which means that they have a high chance of being damaged and falling. We hypothesize that humanoid robots would be mostly used in buildings, which makes them likely to be close t
The use of drones in human-populated areas is increasing day by day. Such robots flying in close proximity to humans and potentially interacting with them, as in object handover or delivery, need to carefully plan their navigation considering the presence of humans. We propose a humanaware 3D reacti…
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are a major health issue often caused by awkward postures. Identifying and recommending more ergonomic body postures requires optimizing the worker’s motion with respect to ergonomics criteria based on the human kinematic/kinetic state. However, many ergonomics
Sharing the control of a robotic system with an autonomous controller allows a human to reduce his/her cognitive and physical workload during the execution of a task. In recent years, the development of inference and learning techniques has widened the spectrum of applications of shared control (SC)
When a human is interacting physically with a robot to accomplish a task, his/her posture is inevitably influenced by the robot movement. Since the human is not controllable, an active robot imposing a collaborative trajectory should predict the most likely human posture. This prediction should cons
Generating complex movements in redundant robots like humanoids is usually done by means of multi-task controllers based on quadratic programming, where a multitude of tasks is organized according to strict or soft priorities. Time-consuming tuning and expertise are required to choose suitable task
In industry, ergonomic assessment is currently performed manually based on the identification of postures and actions by experts. We aim at proposing a system for automatic ergonomic assessment based on activity recognition. In this letter, we define a taxonomy of activities, composed of four levels
Human-humanoid collaborative tasks require that the robot take into account the goals of the task, interaction forces with the human, and its own balance. We present a formulation for a real-time humanoid controller which allows the robot to keep itself balanced, while also assisting the human in ac…
The success of robots in real-world environments is largely dependent on their ability to interact with both humans and said environment. The FP7 EU project CoDyCo focused on the latter of these two challenges by exploiting both rigid and compliant contacts dynamics in the robot control problem. Reg
One of the key problems in planning and control of redundant robots is the fast generation of controls when multiple tasks and constraints need to be satisfied. In the literature, this problem is classically solved by multi-task prioritized approaches, where the priority of each task is determined b…
Classically robot force control passes through joint torques measurement or estimation. Within this context, classical torque sensing technologies rely on current sensing on motor windings and on torsion sensing on motor shaft. An alternative approach was recently proposed in [1] and combines whole-…
In whole-body control, joint torques and external forces need to be estimated accurately. In principle, this can be done through pervasive joint-torque sensing and accurate system identification. However, these sensors are expensive and may not be integrated in all links. Moreover, the exact positio…