16 accepted papers
Ensuring safety in robotic manipulation is increasingly critical as robots become integrated into human-shared environments for complex physical interaction tasks. This paper presents an energy-aware control framework that combines active responses with passive compliance for safety-critical robotic
Ensuring safety in robotic manipulation is increasingly critical as robots become integrated into human-shared environments for complex physical interaction tasks. This paper presents an energy-aware control framework that combines active responses with passive compliance for safety-critical robotic…
Impedance control can be achieved within a model predictive control (MPC) framework for optimization and constraint compliance. However, user-defined or optimization-derived impedance models can be too conservative to achieve a timely convergence, or too aggressive to ensure safety. To address this,
As one of the most fundamental control modes in robotics, force/torque (F/T) control plays an essential role in a wide range of applications. However, classical F/T control fails to offer effective means to regulate the convergence sequence of the controlled states, which is beneficial in many real-
The potential of tactile sensing for dexterous robotic manipulation has been demonstrated by its ability to enable nuanced real-world interactions. In this study, the retrieval of unknown objects from confined spaces, which is unsuitable for conventional visual perception and gripper-based manipulat…
The human sense of touch enables us to perform delicate tasks on deformable objects and/or in a vision-denied environment. To achieve similar desirable interactions for robots, such as administering a swab test, tactile information sensed beyond the tool-in-hand is crucial for contact state estimati
Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), a type of “artificial muscles”, can generate significant deformations and offer speedy responses when exposed to voltage. Owing to their high electromechanical conversion efficiency and great flexibility, they have been extensively used in soft robot applicatio
Robots are increasingly expected to manipulate objects, of which properties have high perceptual uncertainty from any single sensory modality. This directly impacts successful object manipulation. Object packing is one of the challenging tasks in robot manipulation. In this work, a new visuo-tactile
Object state and shape estimation is essential in many robotic manipulation tasks (e.g., in-hand manipulation, insertion). While such estimation is typically relied on visual perception, for tasks to be carried out in a vision-degraded or vision-denied environment, haptics becomes the reliable sourc
Active object detection (AOD) offers significant advantage in expanding the perceptual capacity of a robotics system. AOD is formulated as a sequential action decision process to determine optimal viewpoints to identify objects of interest in a visual scene. While reinforcement learning (RL) has bee
Planar pushing is a fundamental robot manipulation task with most algorithms built upon the quasi-static as-sumption. Under this assumption the end-effector should apply force on the pushed object along the full moving trajectory. This means that the target position must lie in the robot's workspace…
Manipulation in a densely cluttered environment creates complex challenges in perception to close the control loop, many of which are due to the sophisticated physical interaction between the environment and the manipulator. Drawing from biological sensory-motor control, to handle the task in such a…
Nowadays, robots are increasingly used in various surgery applications. Meanwhile, in many of these applications, the operation tools of surgical robots need to be in contact with human soft tissues. Furthermore, this tool-soft tissue interaction brings great challenges to robot control and system p
Active vision is a desirable perceptual feature for robots. Existing approaches usually make strong assumptions about the task and environment, thus are less robust and efficient. This study proposes an adaptive view planning approach to boost the efficiency and robustness of active object detection…
Robotic systems are increasingly required not only to generate precise motions to complete their tasks but also to handle the interactions with the environment or human. Significantly, soft interaction brings great challenges on the force control due to the nonlinear, viscoelastic and inhomogeneous…
Soft robots have recently evoked extensive attention due to their abilities to work effectively in unstructured environments. As an actuation technology of soft robots, dielectric elastomers exhibit many intriguing attributes such as large strain and high energy density. This work presents a novel d…