Publications de Sylvain Calinon

Tactile Ergodic Coverage on Curved Surfaces

In this article, we present a feedback control method for tactile coverage tasks such as cleaning or surface inspection. Although these tasks are challenging to plan due to the complexity of continuous physical interactions, the coverage target and progres ...

2025

Robust contact-rich manipulation through implicit motor adaptation

Sylvain Calinon, Suhan Narayana Shetty

Contact-rich manipulation plays an important role in daily human activities. However, uncertain physical parameters often pose significant challenges for both planning and control. A promising strategy is to develop policies that are robust across a wide r ...

SAGE Publications2025

Robust pushing: Exploiting quasi-static belief dynamics and contact-informed optimization

Sylvain Calinon, Julius Maximilian Jankowski

Non-prehensile manipulation such as pushing is typically subject to uncertain, non-smooth dynamics. However, modeling the uncertainty of the dynamics typically results in intractable belief dynamics, making data-efficient planning under uncertainty difficu ...

SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD2025

From Movement Primitives to Distance Fields to Dynamical Systems

Sylvain Calinon, Yiming Li

Developing autonomous robots capable of learning complex motions from demonstrations remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. On the one hand, movement primitives (MP) provide a compact and modular representation of continuous trajectories. On the othe ...

2025

A Minimum-Jerk Approach to Handle Singularities in Virtual Fixtures

Sylvain Calinon

Implementing virtual fixtures in guiding tasks constrains the movement of the robot's end effector to specific curves within its workspace. However, incorporating guiding frameworks may encounter discontinuities when optimizing the reference target positio ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2024

D-LGP: Dynamic Logic-Geometric Program for Reactive Task and Motion Planning

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard

Many real-world sequential manipulation tasks involve a combination of discrete symbolic search and continuous motion planning, collectively known as combined task and motion planning (TAMP). However, prevailing methods often struggle with the computationa ...

IEEE2024

Online Multicontact Receding Horizon Planning via Value Function Approximation

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

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

A Probabilistic Approach to Multi-Modal Adaptive Virtual Fixtures

Sylvain Calinon

Virtual Fixtures (VFs) provide haptic feedback for teleoperation, typically requiring distinct input modalities for different phases of a task. This often results in vision- and position-based fixtures. Vision-based fixtures, particularly, require the hand ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Extending the Cooperative Dual-Task Space in Conformal Geometric Algebra

Sylvain Calinon, Tobias Löw

In this work, we are presenting an extension of the cooperative dual-task space (CDTS) in conformal geometric algebra. The CDTS was first defined using dual quaternion algebra and is a well established framework for the simplified definition of tasks using ...

IEEE2024

Logic Learning From Demonstrations for Multi-Step Manipulation Tasks in Dynamic Environments

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) stands as an efficient framework for imparting human-like skills to robots. Nevertheless, designing an LfD framework capable of seamlessly imitating, generalizing, and reacting to disturbances for long-horizon manipulation ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2024

An Optimal Control Formulation of Tool Affordance Applied to Impact Tasks

Sylvain Calinon, Jie Zhao

Humans use tools to complete impact-aware tasks, such as hammering a nail or playing tennis. The postures adopted to use these tools can significantly influence the performance of these tasks, where the force or velocity of the hand holding a tool plays a ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Representing Robot Geometry as Distance Fields: Applications to Whole-body Manipulation

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard, Yiming Li

In this work, we propose a novel approach to represent robot geometry as distance fields (RDF) that extends the principle of signed distance fields (SDFs) to articulated kinematic chains. Our method employs a combination of Bernstein polynomials to encode ...

IEEE2024

Online Learning of Continuous Signed Distance Fields Using Piecewise Polynomials

Sylvain Calinon, Yiming Li

Reasoning about distance is indispensable for establishing or avoiding contact in manipulation tasks. To this end, we present an online approach for learning implicit representations of signed distance using piecewise polynomial basis functions. Starting f ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Learning Joint Space Reference Manifold for Reliable Physical Assistancey

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard

This paper presents a study on the use of the Talos humanoid robot for performing assistive sit-to-stand or stand-to-sit tasks. In such tasks, the human exerts a large amount of force (100-200 N) within a very short time (2-8 s), posing significant challen ...

IEEE2023

Geometric Algebra for Optimal Control With Applications in Manipulation Tasks

Sylvain Calinon, Tobias Löw

Many problems in robotics are fundamentally problems of geometry, which have led to an increased research effort in geometric methods for robotics in recent years. The results were algorithms using the various frameworks of screw theory, Lie algebra, and d ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Demonstration-guided Optimal Control for Long-term Non-prehensile Planar Manipulation

Sylvain Calinon

Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for robot planning and feedback control. It is characterized by underactuation, hybrid control, and contact uncertainty. One main difficulty is to determine both the continuous and discrete ...

IEEE2023

A geometric optimal control approach for imitation and generalization of manipulation skills

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard, Jie Zhao

Daily manipulation tasks are characterized by regular features associated with the task structure, which can be described by multiple geometric primitives related to actions and object shapes. Only using Cartesian coordinate systems cannot fully represent ...

Elsevier2023

VP-STO: Via-point-based Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Reactive Robot Behavior

Sylvain Calinon, Julius Maximilian Jankowski

Achieving reactive robot behavior in complex dynamic environments is still challenging as it relies on being able to solve trajectory optimization problems quickly enough, such that we can replan the future motion at frequencies which are sufficiently high ...

IEEE2023

Whole-Body Ergodic Exploration With a Manipulator Using Diffusion

Sylvain Calinon, Tobias Löw

This letter presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot trajectory with the ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2023

Combining Social and Intrinsically-Motivated Learning for Multi-Task Robot Skill Acquisition

Sylvain Calinon, Thibaut Antoine Kulak

IEEE2023