All papers

The Mobile Manipulation Hackathon was held in late 2018 during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) to showcase the latest applications of wheeled robotic manipulators. The challenge had an open format, where teams developed an application using simulation tools and integrated it into a robotic platform...

A comprehensive Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLiSS) for human Long-duration Space Exploration Missions (LDSEMs) requires an innovative design philosophy and novel technical solutions. SIRONA: Sustainable Integration of Regenerative Outer-space Nature and Agriculture is a greenhouse design that produces a wide variety of food sources and provides life support functions, including...

Soft robots are becoming increasingly prevalent, with unique applications to medical devices and wearable technology. Understanding the dynamics of nonlinear soft actuators is crucial to creating controllable soft robots. this letter presents a system identification process and closed-loop control of foldable HASEL (hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic) soft actuators. We characterized...

We present algorithms and results for a robotic manipulation system that was designed to be easily programable and adaptable to various tasks common to industrial setting, which is inspired by the Industrial Assembly Challenge at the 2018 World Robotics Summit in Tokyo. This challenge included assembly of standard, commercially available...

The Industrial Assembly Challenge at the World Robot Summit was held in 2018 to showcase the state-of-the-art of autonomous manufacturing systems. The challenge included various tasks, such as bin picking, kitting, and assembly of standard industrial parts into 2D and 3D assemblies. Some of the tasks were only revealed at...

We present a library to automatically embed signal processing and neural network predictions into the material robots are made of. Deep and shallow neural network models are first trained offline using state-of-the-art machine learning tools and then transferred onto general purpose microcontrollers that are co-located with a robot's sensors and...

Plant growth systems are a critical component of a comprehensive Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLiSS) for long-duration human space exploration missions. Previous BLiSS technology development and crop selection have primarily focused on optimization of edible biomass and caloric content. In light of advances in horticulture, human space flight science, technology...

We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role during control by the tight integration of sensors, actuators, computation, and communication. We...

This paper examines the important problem of cooperative localization in robot swarms, in the presence of unmodeled errors experienced by real sensors in hardware platforms. Many existing methods for cooperative swarm localization rely on approximate distance metric heuristics based on properties of the communication graph. We present a new cooperative...