7,784 research outputs found
A hyper-redundant manipulator
“Hyper-redundant” manipulators have a very large number of actuatable degrees of freedom. The benefits of hyper-redundant robots include the ability to avoid obstacles, increased robustness with respect to mechanical failure, and the ability to perform new forms of robot locomotion and grasping. The authors examine hyper-redundant manipulator design criteria and the physical implementation of one particular design: a variable geometry truss
Reactive Base Control for On-The-Move Mobile Manipulation in Dynamic Environments
We present a reactive base control method that enables high performance
mobile manipulation on-the-move in environments with static and dynamic
obstacles. Performing manipulation tasks while the mobile base remains in
motion can significantly decrease the time required to perform multi-step
tasks, as well as improve the gracefulness of the robot's motion. Existing
approaches to manipulation on-the-move either ignore the obstacle avoidance
problem or rely on the execution of planned trajectories, which is not suitable
in environments with dynamic objects and obstacles. The presented controller
addresses both of these deficiencies and demonstrates robust performance of
pick-and-place tasks in dynamic environments. The performance is evaluated on
several simulated and real-world tasks. On a real-world task with static
obstacles, we outperform an existing method by 48\% in terms of total task
time. Further, we present real-world examples of our robot performing
manipulation tasks on-the-move while avoiding a second autonomous robot in the
workspace. See https://benburgesslimerick.github.io/MotM-BaseControl for
supplementary materials
Exploring Kinodynamic Fabrics for Reactive Whole-Body Control of Underactuated Humanoid Robots
For bipedal humanoid robots to successfully operate in the real world, they
must be competent at simultaneously executing multiple motion tasks while
reacting to unforeseen external disturbances in real-time. We propose
Kinodynamic Fabrics as an approach for the specification, solution and
simultaneous execution of multiple motion tasks in real-time while being
reactive to dynamism in the environment. Kinodynamic Fabrics allows for the
specification of prioritized motion tasks as forced spectral semi-sprays and
solves for desired robot joint accelerations at real-time frequencies. We
evaluate the capabilities of Kinodynamic fabrics on diverse physically
challenging whole-body control tasks with a bipedal humanoid robot both in
simulation and in the real-world. Kinodynamic Fabrics outperforms the
state-of-the-art Quadratic Program based whole-body controller on a variety of
whole-body control tasks on run-time and reactivity metrics in our experiments.
Our open-source implementation of Kinodynamic Fabrics as well as robot
demonstration videos can be found at this url:
https://adubredu.github.io/kinofabs
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