In this thesis, we concentrate on advancing high-level behavioral control policies for robotic systems within the framework of Dynamical Systems (DS). Throughout the course of this research, a unifying thread weaving through diverse fields emerges, and tha ...
Multimodal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating enve ...
The use of aerial vehicles for exploration and data collection has the potential to significantly aid environmental monitoring in environments which are dangerous and hard to navigate. However, within these environments navigation can often be restricted b ...
Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...
Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...
One can estimate the velocity and acceleration of robot manipulators by utilizing nonlinear observers. This involves combining inertial measurement units (IMUs) with the motor encoders of the robot through a model-based sensor fusion technique. This approa ...
Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...
There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...
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 ...
The thesis at hand is concerned with robots' navigation in human crowds. Specifically, methods are developed for planning a mobile robot's local motion between pedestrians, and they are evaluated in experiments where a robot interacts with real pedestrians ...
