Compliant motions allow alignment of workpieces using naturally occurring interaction forces. However, free-floating objects do not have a fixed base to absorb the reaction forces caused by the interactions. Consequently, if the interaction forces are too high, objects can gain momentum and move away after contact. This paper proposes an approach based on direct force control for compliant manipulation of free-floating objects. The objective of the controller is to minimize the interaction forces while maintaining the contact. The proposed approach achieves this by maintaining small constant force along the motion direction and an apparent reduction of manipulator inertia along remaining Degrees of Freedom (DOF). Simulation results emphasize the importance of relative inertia of the robotic manipulator with respect to the free-floating object. The experiments were performed with KUKA LWR4+ manipulator arm and a two-dimensional micro-gravity emulator (object floating on an air bed), which was developed in-house. It was verified that the proposed control law is capable of controlling the interaction forces and aligning the tools without pushing the object away. We conclude that direct force control works better with a free-floating object than implicit force control algorithms, such as impedance control.
Compliant In-hand Rolling Manipulation Using Tactile Sensing
Center for Robotics and Biosystems and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University（机器人与生物系统中心和机械工程系，西北大学）；Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)（复杂系统研究所（NICO））
Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight, easy-to-build, highly compliant dense geometry sensor and end effector that comprises an inflated latex membrane with a depth sensor behind it. We present the motivations and the hardware design for this Soft-bubble and demonstrate its capabilities through example tasks including tactile-object classification, pose estimation and tracking, and nonprehensile object ma…
A Dexterous and Compliant Gripper With Soft Hydraulic Actuation for Microgravity Manipulation
Aerospace Engineering Program, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校航空航天工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校机械工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学机械工程系）
Surface-based Manipulation Using Tunable Compliant Porous-Elastic Soft Sensing
Soft BioRobotics Perception Group at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院软生物机器人感知组）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Biorobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（圣安娜高等学院生物机器人研究所）；Soft Robotics Lab, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学软机器人实验室）
We present a trajectory planning and control architecture for bipedal locomotion at a variety of speeds on a highly underactuated and compliant bipedal robot. A library of compliant walking trajectories are planned offline, and stored as compact arrays of polynomial coefficients for tracking online. The control implementation uses a floating-base inverse dynamics controller which generates dynamically consistent feedforward torques to realize walking using information obtained from the trajectory optimization. The effectiveness of the controller is demonstrated in simulation and on hardware fo…
PRISMA Lab, department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the University of Naples Federico II（PRISMA实验室，那不勒斯费德里科二世大学电气工程与信息科技系）；Inria, CNRS, Université de Lorraine（Inria、CNRS、洛林大学）；ABB Corporate Research Center（ABB企业研究中心）
AMBER: A tether-deployable gripping crawler with compliant microspines for canopy manipulation
eAviation Laboratory, TUM School of Engineering and Design（eAviation实验室，技术大学工程与设计学院）；Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics, EMPA（可持续机器人实验室，EMPA）；Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics, EPFL（可持续机器人实验室，瑞士联邦理工学院）；Aerial Robotics Laboratory, Imperial College London（空域机器人实验室，伦敦帝国理工学院）；Bristol University（布里斯托大学）
This paper introduces the i-HY Hand, an underactuated hand driven by 5 actuators that is capable of performing a wide range of grasping and in-hand manipulation tasks. This hand was designed to address the need for a durable, inexpensive, moderately dexterous hand suitable for use on mobile robots. The primary focus of this paper will be on the novel minimalistic design of i-HY, which was developed by choosing a set of target tasks around which the design of the hand was optimized. Particular emphasis is placed on the development of underactuated fingers that are capable of both firm power gra…
Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the challenge of building fast and accurate models of deformable materials. While more data-driven approaches have become more popular for finding controllers that learn to do a single task, there is still a strong motivation for a model-based method that could be used to solve a large variety of optimization problems. Towards this end, we introduced compliant, position…
Robots must cost less and be force-controlled to enable widespread, safe deployment in unconstrained human environments. We propose Quasi-Direct Drive actuation as a capable paradigm for robotic force-controlled manipulation in human environments at low-cost. Our prototype - Blue - is a human scale 7 Degree of Freedom arm with 2kg payload. Blue can cost less than $5000. We show that Blue has dynamic properties that meet or exceed the needs of human operators: the robot has a nominal position-control bandwidth of 7.5Hz and repeatability within 4mm. We demonstrate a Virtual Reality based interfa…
Hunan University（湖南大学）；Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
In this work, we focus on improving the robot's dexterous capability by exploiting visual sensing and adaptive force control. TeachNet, a vision-based teleoperation learning framework, is exploited to map human hand postures to a multi-fingered robot hand. We augment TeachNet, which is originally based on an imprecise kinematic mapping and position-only servoing, with a biomimetic learning-based compliance control algorithm for dexterous manipulation tasks. This compliance controller takes the mapped robotic joint angles from TeachNet as the desired goal, computes the desired joint torques. It…
CompliantVLA-adaptor: VLM-Guided Variable Impedance Action for Safe Contact-Rich Manipulation
Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy（人机交互实验室，意大利理工学院，热那亚，意大利）；Ph.D. program of national interest in Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIM) and Università di Genova, Genoa, Italy（机器人与智能机器国家利益博士项目和热那亚大学，热那亚，意大利）；Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA（工业工程埃德华森学校，普渡大学，西拉法克萨，印第安纳州47907，美国）；Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA（佐治亚理工学院，亚特兰大，美国）；German Research Center for AI, Germany（德国人工智能研究中心，德国）；TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany（图宾根大学，图宾根，德国）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院，卡尔斯鲁厄，德国）
CRISP -- Compliant ROS2 Controllers for Learning-Based Manipulation Policies and Teleoperation
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology（TUM计算、信息与技术学院）；Department of Computer Engineering（计算机工程系）；Learning Systems and Robotics Lab（学习系统与机器人实验室）；TUM Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑技术大学机器人与人工智能研究所（MIRMI））
Although autonomous control of robotic manipulators has been studied for several decades, they are not commonly used in safety-critical applications due to lack of safety and performance guarantees - many of them concerning the modulation of interaction forces. This paper presents a mechanical probing strategy for estimating the environmental impedance parameters of compliant environments, independent a manipulator's controller design, and configuration. The parameter estimates are used in a position-based adaptive force controller to enable control of interaction forces in compliant, stationa…
Residual Compliant Policy: Learning Compliant Policies from Few Demonstrations
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；German Research Center for AI (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)（德国机器人研究所）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
The robotic manipulation of compliant objects is currently one of the most active problems in robotics due to its potential to automate many important applications. Despite the progress achieved by the robotics community in recent years, the 3D shaping of these types of materials remains an open research problem. In this paper, we propose a new vision-based controller to automatically regulate the shape of compliant objects with robotic arms. Our method uses an efficient online surface/curve fitting algorithm that quantifies the object's geometry with a compact vector of features; This feedbac…
Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception systems. This paper demonstrates that the combination of state-of-the-art object tracking with passively adaptive mechanical hardware can be leveraged to complete precision manipulation tasks with tight, industrially-relevant tolerances (0.25mm). The proposed control method closes the loop through vision by tracking the relative 6D pose of objects in the relevant …
AllTact Fin Ray: A Compliant Robot Gripper with Omni-Directional Tactile Sensing
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学机械工程系）；Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute（清华大学-伯克利深圳研究院）；Institute of Data and Information, Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学数据与信息研究所、深圳国际研究生院）
本文提出 AllTact Fin Ray 柔顺机器人夹爪，通过相机捕捉指体形变，并提出基于边缘特征重建全局形变与动态参考图像亮度差异计算接触几何的新方法，实现了全向触觉感知，在接触检测、力估计和精确操作等任务中验证了有效性。
AeRSoM: An Aerial Rigid-Soft Integrated Manipulator for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Hunan University（湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Center for Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology（国家机器人视觉感知与控制技术工程研究中心）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Learning Smooth and Robust Space Robotic Manipulation of Dynamic Target via Inter-frame Correlation
Research Center for Intelligent Robotics, School of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学航天学院智能机器人研究中心）；School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）；School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sichuan University（四川大学空天科学与工程学院）
WasserMan: Benchmark for Underwater Manipulation Policy Learning
Central University（中央大学）；Center for Engineering Systems and Sciences（工程系统与科学中心）；Sirius University of Science and Technology（天狼星科技大学）；V. A. Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院特拉佩兹尼科夫控制科学研究所）
Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when the tool is compliant, and the robot cannot be expected to have the full geometry and physical properties (e.g., mass, stiffness, and friction) of all the tools it must use. We propose a framework that learns to predict the effects of a robot's actions on the contact between the tool and the environment given visuo-tactile perception. Key to our framework is …
