14 accepted papers
Conventional bidirectional conveyance platforms use a flat translating belt or a series of spinning wheels or rollers to apply a shear force to payloads to move them. Wheel/roller-based conveyors in particular cannot double as a worktop when idle, do not support collision-free multi-object manipulat…
The seafood processing industry provides fertile ground for robotics to impact the future-of-work from multiple perspectives including productivity, worker safety, and quality of work life. The robotics research challenge in this domain is the realization of flexible and reliable manipulation of sof…
Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is widely used in industrial quality control and automation to test the purity and grade of items. In this research, we propose a novel sensorized end effector and acquisition strategy to capture spectral signatures from objects and register them with a 3D point clou…
Visual navigation has received significant attention recently. Most of the prior works focus on predicting navigation actions based on semantic features extracted from visual encoders. However, these approaches often rely on large datasets and exhibit limited generalizability. In contrast, our appro…
Shared control can ease and enhance a human operator’s ability to teleoperate robots, particularly for intricate tasks demanding fine control over multiple degrees of freedom. However, the arbitration process dictating how much autonomous assistance to administer in shared control can confuse novice…
Obstacle detection is a safety-critical problem in robot navigation, where stereo matching is a popular vision-based approach. While deep neural networks have shown impressive results in computer vision, most of the previous obstacle detection works only leverage traditional stereo matching techniqu…
This paper reports on Team Northeastern's Avatar system for telepresence, and our holistic approach to meet the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Final testing task requirements. The system features a dual-arm configuration with hydraulically actuated glove-gripper pair for haptic force feedback. Our proposed Avata…
Recent work on robot learning with visual observations has shown great success in solving many manipulation tasks. While visual observations contain rich information about the environment and the robot, they can be unreliable in the presence of visual noise or occlusions. In these cases, we can leve…
Localizing and tracking the pose of robotic grippers are necessary skills for manipulation tasks. However, the manipulators with imprecise kinematic models (e.g. low-cost arms) or manipulators with unknown world coordinates (e.g. poor camera-arm calibration) cannot locate the gripper with respect to…
We present a contact-implicit trajectory optimization framework that can plan contact-interaction trajectories for different robot architectures and tasks using a trivial initial guess and without requiring any parameter tuning. This is achieved by using a relaxed contact model along with an automat…
In this paper, we propose a contact-implicit trajectory optimization (CITO) method based on a variable smooth contact model (VSCM) and successive convexification (SCvx). The VSCM facilitates the convergence of gradient-based optimization without compromising physical fidelity. On the other hand, the…
In this paper, we analyze systems with low throughput human-machine interfaces (such as a brain-computer interface, single switch interface) from the controls perspective. We develop some principles for performance improvement in such systems based on the parallelization of inference and robot motio…
This paper introduces an anytime synthesized motion planning algorithm for humanoid robots unifying locomotion and manipulation planning. It generates an entire set of motions to finish specific tasks in an environment containing obstacles by exploiting a powerful inverse kinematics (IK) engine. The…
Motions of a robot interacting with its environment can be described by a set of constraints. This paper introduces an approach, called motion template, which can quickly program and compose the constraints for the motion planner to generate the trajectory. Two types of motion templates, grasp and t…