Control of Nonprehensile Manipulation
AbstractNonprehensile manipulation is the process of manipulating a part without a form- or force-closure grasp. Without such a grasp, the part is free to roll, slide, or break contact with the...
View ArticleFeedback Control for Distributed Manipulation
AbstractWe consider the feedback stabilization of a part being manipulated by a distributed array of actuators. Previously, the authors showed that open loop methods based on programmable vector fields...
View Article9 On Observing Contact States in Overconstrained Manipulation
AbstractEstimation of contact state is important to any multi-point interaction that involves frictional stick/slip phenomena. In particular, when there are more kinematic constraints than there are...
View ArticleMechanical Manipulation Using Reduced Models of Uncertainty
AbstractIn this paper we describe methods applicable to the modeling and control of mechanical manipulation problems, including those that experience uncertain stick/slip phenomena. Manipulation in...
View ArticleA Variational Approach to Strand-Based Modeling of the Human Hand
AbstractThis paper presents a numerical modeling technique for dynamically modeling a human hand. We use a strand-based method of modeling the muscles. Our technique represents a compromise between...
View ArticleAugmenting sensorimotor control using “goal-aware” vibrotactile stimulation...
AbstractWe describe two sets of experiments that examine the ability of vibrotactile encoding of simple position error and combined object states (calculated from an optimal controller) to enhance...
View ArticleAssistive Optimal Control-on-Request with Application in Standing Balance...
AbstractThis chapter develops and applies a new control-on-request (COR) method to improve the capability of existing shared control interfaces. These COR enhanced interfaces allow users to request...
View ArticleAutonomous Visual Rendering using Physical Motion
AbstractThis paper addresses the problem of enabling a robot to represent and recreate visual information through physical motion, focusing on drawing using pens, brushes, or other tools. This work...
View ArticleLow Complexity Control Policy Synthesis for Embodied Computation in Synthetic...
AbstractAs robots become more capable, they also become more complicated—either in terms of their physical bodies or their control architecture, or both. An iterative algorithm is introduced to compute...
View ArticleActive Area Coverage from Equilibrium
Abstract This paper develops a method for robots to integrate stability into actively seeking out informative measurements through coverage. We derive a controller using hybrid systems theory that...
View ArticleHybrid Control for Learning Motor Skills
AbstractWe develop a hybrid control approach for robot learning based on combining learned predictive models with experience-based state-action policy mappings to improve the learning capabilities of...
View ArticleInformation Requirements of Collision-Based Micromanipulation
Abstract We present a task-centered formal analysis of the relative power of several robot designs, inspired by the unique properties and constraints of micro-scale robotic systems. Our task of...
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