19 accepted papers
State-of-the-art approaches to footstep planning assume reduced-order dynamics when solving the combinatorial problem of selecting contact surfaces in real time. However, in exchange for computational efficiency, these approaches ignore joint torque limits and limb dynamics. In this work, we address…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel optimization approach that exploits the derivatives of the motion…
This work presents a novel dense RGB-D SLAM approach for dynamic planar environments that enables simultaneous multi-object tracking, camera localisation and background reconstruction. Previous dynamic SLAM methods either rely on semantic segmentation to directly detect dynamic objects; or assume th
This work presents an approach for modelling and tracking previously unseen objects for robotic grasping tasks. Using the motion of objects in a scene, our approach segments rigid entities from the scene and continuously tracks them to create a dense and sparse model of the object and the environmen
Path planning and collision avoidance are challenging in complex and highly variable environments due to the limited horizon of events. In literature, there are multiple model- and learning-based approaches that require significant computational resources to be effectively deployed and they may have…
Benchmarks of state-of-the-art rigid-body dynamics libraries report better performance solving the inverse dynamics problem than the forward alternative. Those benchmarks encouraged us to question whether that computational advantage would translate to direct transcription, where calculating rigid-b…
This work presents a novel RGB-D SLAM approach to simultaneously segment, track and reconstruct the static background and large dynamic rigid objects that can occlude major portions of the camera view. Previous approaches treat dynamic parts of a scene as outliers and are thus limited to a small amo
Optimal control is a popular approach to synthesize highly dynamic motion. Commonly, L2 regularization is used on the control inputs in order to minimize energy used and to ensure smoothness of the control inputs. However, for some systems, such as satellites, the control needs to be applied in spar…
In this paper, we study a wheeled robot with a prismatic extension joint. This allows the robot to build up momentum to perform jumps over obstacles and to swing up to the upright position after the loss of balance. We propose a template model for the class of such two-wheeled jumping robots. This m…
This paper focuses on robustness to disturbance forces and uncertain payloads. We present a novel formulation to optimize the robustness of dynamic trajectories. A straightforward transcription of this formulation into a nonlinear programming problem is not tractable for state-of-the-art solvers, bu…
Common formulations to consider collision avoidance in trajectory optimization often use either preprocessed environments or only check and penalize collisions at discrete time steps. However, when only checking at discrete states, this requires either large margins that prevent manipulation close t…
The analysis, design, and motion planning of robotic systems, often relies on its forward and inverse dynamic models. When executing a task involving interaction with the environment, both the task and the environment impose constraints on the robots motion. For modeling such systems, we need to in…
In this work we present an articulated tracking approach for robotic manipulators, which relies only on visual cues from colour and depth images to estimate the robot's state when interacting with or being occluded by its environment. We hypothesise that articulated model fitting approaches can only…
In this letter, we first theoretically prove the conditions and boundaries of resolution completeness for deterministic roadmap methods with a discretized workspace. A novel variant of such methods, the hierarchical dynamic roadmap (HDRM), is then proposed for solving complex planning problems. A un
Motion planning through optimization is largely based on locally improving the cost of a trajectory until an optimal solution is found. Choosing the initial trajectory has therefore a significant effect on the performance of the motion planner, especially when the cost landscape contains local minim…
Trajectory planning and replanning in complex environments often reuses very little information from the previous solutions. This is particularly evident when the motion is repeated multiple times with only a limited amount of variation between each run. To address this issue, we propose the DRM-con…
A key prerequisite for planning manipulation together with locomotion of humanoids in complex environments is to find a valid end-pose with a feasible stance location and a full-body configuration that is balanced and collision-free. Prior work based on the inverse dynamic reachability map assumed t
A large class of motions can be decomposed into a movement task and null-space policy subject to a set of constraints. When learning such motions from demonstrations, we aim to achieve generalisation across different unseen constraints and to increase the robustness to noise while keeping the comput…
Many practical tasks in robotic systems, such as cleaning windows, writing or grasping, are inherently constrained. Learning policies subject to constraints is a challenging problem. We propose a \emph{locally weighted constrained projection learning} method (LWCPL) that first estimates the constra…