Publications related to DARPA Grand Challenge

Online Multicontact Receding Horizon Planning via Value Function Approximation

Planning multicontact motions in a receding horizon fashion requires a value function to guide the planning with respect to the future, e.g., building momentum to traverse large obstacles. Traditionally, the value function is approximated by computing traj ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Reliable strategies for implementing model-based navigation on fixed-wing drones

Jan Skaloud, Gabriel François Laupré, Lucas Pirlet

A relatively novel approach of autonomous navigation employing platform dynamics as the primary process model raises new implementational challenges. These are related to: (i) potential numerical instabilities during longer flights; (ii) the quality of mod ...

2023

Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Fabio Zuliani

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...

EPFL2023

Locomotion of Sensor‐Integrated Soft Robotic Devices Inside Sub‐Millimeter Arteries with Impaired Flow Conditions

Diego Ghezzi, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Lorenzo Francesco John Noseda, Amit Yedidia Dolev, Lucio Feo Pancaldi-Giubbini, Adele Fanelli

One of the grand challenges in interventional cardiology and neuroradiology is to minimize the operation time and risk of damage during catheterization. These two factors drastically increase if the target location resides in small and tortuous vessels. Fl ...

Wiley2022

Advancing the Adaptability of Compliant Robot Controllers for Exploration, Interaction, and Manipulation

Farshad Khadivar

As technology continues to evolve, robots are becoming an intrinsic part of our lives. While robots surpass human capabilities in precision and speed, they are far from matching humans' ability to adapt to unexpected changes. Humans can quickly and complia ...

EPFL2022

Enhancing our understanding of human fine manipulation skills and advancing robot dexterity in grasping

Kunpeng Yao

From surgery to watchmaking, fine-manipulation skills highly rely on the dexterity afforded by both hands. Coordination is key to human dexterity. Specifically, humans need not only to govern the abundant intrinsic degrees of freedom (DOFs) to allocate con ...

EPFL2022

Flexure Variable Stiffness Actuators

Jamie Paik, Mustafa Mete, Frédéric Henri Vaskin Giraud

Series elastic actuators (SEAs) and variable elastic actuators (VSAs) provide shock resistance, energy storage, and stable force control. However, they usually require extra springs, mechanical parts, and transmissions, increasing size, weight, number of m ...

2022

AcinoSet: A 3D Pose Estimation Dataset and Baseline Models for Cheetahs in the Wild

Alexander Mathis, Mackenzie Mathis

Animals are capable of extreme agility, yet understanding their complex dynamics, which have ecological, biomechanical and evolutionary implications, remains challenging. Being able to study this incredible agility will be critical for the development of n ...

IEEE2021

Whole Body Model Predictive Control with a Memory of Motion: Experiments on a Torque-Controlled Talos

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono, Rohan Budhiraja

This paper presents the first successful experiment implementing whole-body model predictive control with state feedback on a torque-control humanoid robot. We demonstrate that our control scheme is able to do whole-body target tracking, control the balanc ...

IEEE2021

Spontaneous Gait Transitions of Sprawling Quadruped Locomotion by Sensory-Driven Body-Limb Coordination Mechanisms

Auke Ijspeert, Shura Suzuki

Deciphering how quadrupeds coordinate their legs and other body parts, such as the trunk, head, and tail (i.e., body-limb coordination), can provide informative insights to improve legged robot mobility. In this study, we focused on sprawling locomotion of ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2021

Gallium-Based Thin Films for Wearable Sensors and Electronic Skins

Laurent Mirko Dejace

Integrated wearable electronics capable of providing biophysical information on complex and dynamic systems have attracted high interest in diverse fields such as healthcare, gaming and robotics. Wearable sensors can create artificial, electronic skins wit ...

EPFL2020

Towards the alignment of educational robotics learning systems with classroom activities

Christian Giang

The technological advances of the past years have impressively demonstrated that the digital age is no longer just a science fiction vision of the future - we are in the midst of it. The digital transformation is affecting many areas of our lives, includin ...

EPFL2020

Recent Advances in Robot Learning from Demonstration

Aude Billard, Athanasios Polydoros

In the context of robotics and automation, learning from demonstration (LfD) is the paradigm in which robots acquire new skills by learning to imitate an expert. The choice of LfD over other robot learning methods is compelling when ideal behavior can be n ...

2020

A Comparative Study of Collision Avoidance Algorithms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Performance and Robustness to Noise

Denis Gillet, Alcherio Martinoli, Steven Adriaan Roelofsen

Over the past years, the field of small unmanned aerial vehicles has grown significantly and several applications have appeared, requiring always more autonomous flight. An important remaining challenge for fully autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles is coll ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2019

Bi-Modal Control of Vacuum-Powered Soft Pneumatic Actuators with Embedded Liquid Metal-Based Strain Sensitive Skin

Stéphanie Lacour, Jamie Paik, Matthew Aaron Robertson, Laurent Mirko Dejace

Soft robotic systems are composed of active and passively deformable structures which are intrinsically compliant, flexible, and elastic. Although these features offer benefits of adaptability, robustness, and safety, controlling these types of robots is a ...

IEEE2019

Low voltage fast dielectric elastomer actuators

Xiaobin Ji

This thesis contributes to the field of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs). DEAs are electrostatically driven soft actuators that are fast, capable of generating large actuation strains, high forces, and present high power density. A wide range of appli ...

EPFL2019

From High-Level to Low-Level Robot Learning of Complex Tasks: Leveraging Priors, Metrics and Dynamical Systems

Nadia Barbara Figueroa Fernandez

Humans have a remarkable way of learning, adapting and mastering new manipulation tasks. With the current advances in Machine Learning (ML), the promise of having robots with such capabilities seems to be on the cusp of reality. Transferring human-level sk ...

EPFL2019

Object Grasping of Humanoid Robot Based on YOLO

Daniel Thalmann

This paper presents a system that aims to achieve autonomous grasping for micro-controller based humanoid robots such as the Inmoov robot [1]. The system consists of a visual sensor, a central controller and a manipulator. We modify the open sourced object ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2019

Automatic extraction of constraints in manipulation tasks for autonomy and interaction

Ana-Lucia Ureche

Tasks routinely executed by humans involve sequences of actions performed with high dexterity and coordination. Fully specifying these actions such that a robot could replicate the task is often difficult. Furthermore the uncertainties introduced by the us ...

EPFL2018