IEEE Transactions on Robotics

Active simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the problem of planning and controlling the motion of a robot to build the most accurate and complete model of the surrounding environment. Since the first foundational work in active perception ...

Teleoperation of humanoid robots enables the integration of the cognitive skills and domain expertise of humans with the physical capabilities of humanoid robots. The operational versatility of humanoid robots makes them the ideal platform for a wide ...

The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to the modeling of ...

Learning-enabled control systems have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems in robotics, but this performance comes at the cost of reduced transparency and lack of guarantees on the safety or stability of the ...

The problem of multi-robot target tracking asks for actively planning the joint motion of robots to track targets. In this article, we focus on such target tracking problems in adversarial environments, where attacks or failures may deactivate robots&#...

In this article, we present a distributed algorithm to solve a class of multirobot task assignment problems. We formulate task assignment as a mathematical optimization and solve for optimal solutions with a variant of the consensus alternating direction ...

In this article, we study the problem of multiple stochastic agents interacting in a dynamic game scenario with continuous state and action spaces. We define a new notion of stochastic Nash equilibrium for boundedly rational agents, which we call the ...

Although the use of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has great potential for fast autonomous exploration, it has received far too little attention. In this article, we present a RApid Collaborative ExploRation (RACER) approach using a fleet of ...

Autonomous micro aerial vehicles are deployed for a variety of tasks including surveillance and monitoring. Perching and staring allow the vehicle to monitor targets without flying, saving battery power and increasing the overall mission time without the ...

The problem of safe and fair conflict resolution among inertial, distributed agents—particularly in highly interactive settings—is of paramount importance to the autonomous vehicles industry. The difficulty of solving this problem can be ...

Accurate, self-consistent bathymetric maps are needed to monitor changes in subsea environments and infrastructure. These maps are increasingly collected by underwater vehicles, and mapping requires an accurate vehicle navigation solution. Commercial off-...

The camera is an attractive device for use in beyond visual line of sight drone operation since cameras are low in size, weight, power, and cost. However, state-of-the-art visual localization algorithms have trouble matching visual data that have ...

Autonomous robot operation in unstructured and unknown environments requires efficient techniques for mapping and exploration using streaming range and visual observations. Information-based exploration techniques, such as Cauchy–Schwarz quadratic ...

In this article, we investigate and deploy sampling-based control techniques for the challenging task of the mobile manipulation of articulated objects. By their nature, manipulation tasks necessitate environment interactions, which require the handling ...

Achieving in-hand manipulation of a grasped object is challenging in robotic communities. This article proposes a planar intrinsic in-hand manipulation approach based on isometric transformation. We demonstrate that the isometric transformation (excluding ...

In this article, we define “robotic contact juggling” to be the purposeful control of the motion of a 3-D smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or “hand.” While specific examples of robotic ...

Humans coordinate the abundant degrees of freedom (DoFs) of hands to dexterously perform tasks in everyday life. We imitate human strategies to advance the dexterity of multi-DoF robotic hands. Specifically, we enable a robot hand to grasp multiple ...

Large-scale robotic skin with tactile sensing ability is emerging with the potential for use in close-contact human–robot systems. Although recent developments in vision-based tactile sensing and related learning methods are promising, they have ...

Truss robots are highly redundant parallel robotic systems that can be applied in a variety of scenarios. The variable topology truss (VTT) is a class of modular truss robots. As self-reconfigurable modular robots, a VTT is composed of many edge modules ...

In this article, we propose a path planning methodology for a mobile robot navigating through an obstacle-filled environment to generate a reference path that is traceable with moderate sensing efforts. The desired reference path is characterized as the ...

The multiple-path orienteering problem asks for paths for a team of robots that maximize the total reward collected while satisfying budget constraints on the path length. This problem models many multirobot routing tasks, such as exploring unknown ...

Control Lyapunov function (CLF) and control barrier function (CBF) based quadratic programs (QPs) may create undesirable local equilibria in control systems. One recent solution utilizes a rotating nonradial CLF to avoid such equilibria in regulation ...

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a reactive planning system for bipedal robots on unexplored, challenging terrain. The system includes: a multilayer local map for assessing traversability; an anytime omnidirectional control Lyapunov function for ...

This article studies capturability and push recovery for quadruped locomotion. Despite the rich literature on capturability analysis and push recovery for legged robots, existing tools have been developed mainly with the requirement of reaching static or ...

We developed an exoskeleton for neurorehabilitation that covered all relevant degrees of freedom of the human arm while providing enough range of motion, speed, strength, and haptic-rendering function for therapy of severely affected (e.g., mobilization) ...

Most impedance-based walking controllers for powered knee–ankle prostheses use a finite state machine with dozens of user-specific parameters that require manual tuning by technical experts. These parameters are only appropriate near the task (e.g.,...

Positive biomechanical outcomes have been reported with lower limb exoskeletons in laboratory settings, but these devices have difficulty delivering appropriate assistance in synchrony with human gait as the task or rate of phase progression change in ...

This article presents an assist-as-needed (AAN) control framework for exoskeleton assistance based on human volitional effort prediction via a Hill-type neuromuscular model. A sequential processing algorithm-based multirate observer is applied to ...

Upper limb prostheses are commonly mounted to the human residual limb by a passive socket. By this design, the sensitive residual limb is exposed to high reaction wrenches, which can be a source of medical complications. In this article, we introduce an ...

This article addresses a new way of generating compliant trajectories for control using movement primitives to allow physical human–robot interaction where parallel robots (PRs) are involved. PRs are suitable for tasks requiring precision and ...