14 accepted papers
Robot simulators are indispensable tools across many fields, and recent research has significantly improved their functionality by incorporating additional gradient information. However, existing differentiable robot simulators suffer from non-differentiable singularities, when robots undergo substa…
Modular robotic structures simplify robot design and manufacturing by using standardized modules, enhancing flexibility and adaptability. However, the need for manual input in design and assembly limit their potential. Current methods to automate this process still require significant human effort a
Extensive research has been devoted to the field of multi-agent navigation. Recently, there has been remarkable progress attributed to the emergence of learning-based techniques with substantially elevated intelligence and realism. Nonetheless, prevailing learned models face limitations in terms of
Predicting the state evolution of ultra high-dimensional, time-reversible fluid dynamic systems is a crucial but computationally expensive task. Existing physics-informed neural networks either incur high inference cost or cannot preserve the time-reversible nature of the underlying dynamics system.…
Finding robot poses and trajectories represents a foundational aspect of robot motion planning. Despite decades of research, efficiently and robustly addressing these challenges is still difficult. Existing approaches are often plagued by various limitations, such as intricate geometric approximatio
We present an end-to-end differentiable learning algorithm for multi-agent navigation policies. Compared with prior model-free learning algorithms, our method leads to a significant speedup via the gradient information. Our key innovation lies in a novel differentiability analysis of the optimizatio
Deformable robots are notoriously difficult to model or control due to its high-dimensional configuration spaces. Direct trajectory optimization suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality and incurs a high computational cost, while learning-based controller optimization methods are sensitive to hyper-…
Contact-aware gait trajectory optimization is a challenging non-convex programming problem, especially for complex terrain shapes, where prominent numerical algorithms can fail to find a solution or fall into local minima. To alleviate this issue, we propose an environment warping technique that cha
We propose an optimization-based approach to plan power grasps. Central to our method is a reformulation of grasp planning as an infinite program under complementary constraints (IPCC), which allows contacts to happen between arbitrary pairs of points on the object and the robot gripper. We show tha
Wepropose a variant of alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) to solve constrained trajectory optimization problems. Our ADMM framework breaks a joint optimization into small sub-problems, leading to a low iteration cost and decentralized parameter updates. Starting from a collision-free
We propose a decentralized, learning-based solution to the challenging problem of unlabeled multi-agent navigation among obstacles, where robots need to simultaneously tackle the problems of goal assignment, local collision avoidance, and navigation. Our method has each robot infer their desired act…
Generating locally optimal UAV-trajectories is challenging due to the non-convex constraints of collision avoidance and actuation limits. We present the first local, optimization-based UAV-trajectory generator that simultane-ously guarantees validity and asymptotic optimality for known environments.…
We present a new method to generate optimal grasps for brittle and fragile objects using a novel stress- minimization (SM) metric. Our approach is designed for objects that are composed of homogeneous isotopic materials. Our SM metric measures the maximal resistible external wrenches that would not…
Given an articulated robot arm, we present a method to identify two regions with non-empty interiors. The first region is a subset of the configuration space where every point in the region is manipulable. The second region is a subset of the workspace where every point in the region is reachable by…