9 accepted papers
Physically assistive robots and exoskeletons have great potential to help humans with a wide variety of collaborative tasks. However, a challenging aspect of the control of such devices is to accurately model or predict human behaviour, which can be highly individual and personalised. In this work,…
This letter presents a novel concept to support physically impaired humans in daily object manipulation tasks with a robot. Given a user's manipulation sequence, we propose a predictive model that uniquely casts the user's sequential behavior as well as a robot support intervention into a hierarchic
Contact adaptation is an essential capability when manipulating objects. Two key contact modes of non-prehensile manipulation are sticking and sliding. This paper presents a Trajectory Optimization (TO) method formulated as a Mathematical Program with Complementarity Constraints (MPCC), which is abl…
Reliable contact simulation plays a key role in the development of (semi-)autonomous robots, especially when dealing with contact-rich manipulation scenarios, an active robotics research topic. Besides simulation, components such as sensing, perception, data collection, robot hardware control, human…
Consistent state estimation is challenging, especially under the epistemic uncertainties arising from learned (nonlinear) dynamic and observation models. In this work, we propose a set-based estimation algorithm, named Gaussian Process-Zonotopic Kalman Filter (GP-ZKF), that produces zonotopic state
Multi-robot teams can achieve more dexterous, complex and heavier payload tasks than a single robot, yet effective collaboration is required. Multi-robot collaboration is extremely challenging due to the different kinematic and dynamics capabilities of the robots, the limited communication between t
The transition from free motion to contact is a challenging problem in robotics, in part due to its hybrid nature. Additionally, disregarding the effects of impacts at the motion planning level often results in intractable impulsive contact forces. In this paper, we introduce an impact-aware multi-m…
This work provides a principled formalism to address the joint planning problem in dyadic collaborative manipulation (DcM) scenarios by representing the human’s intentions as task space forces and solving the joint problem holistically via model-based optimization. The proposed method is the first t
This paper presents a method to transfer functional grasps among objects of the same category through contact warping and local replanning. The method transfers implicit knowledge that enables an action on a class of objects for which no explicit grasp or task information has been given in advance.…