Publications associées à Indirect Manipulation of a Sphere on a Flat Disk Using Force Information

Memento Mori: Reliable robustness in self-reconfigurable modular robots

Modular robotics link the reliability of a centralised system with the adaptivity of a decentralised system. It is difficult for a robot with a fixed shape to be able to perform many different types of tasks. As the task space grows, the number of functi ...

EPFL2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Distributed Predictive Formation Control of Autonomous Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

Izzet Kagan Erünsal

This doctoral thesis navigates the complex landscape of motion coordination and formation control within teams of rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Prompted by the intricate demands of real-world applications such as search and rescue or surveillan ...

EPFL2024

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

Avoidance of Concave Obstacles Through Rotation of Nonlinear Dynamics

Aude Billard, Lukas Huber

Controlling complex tasks in robotic systems, such as circular motion for cleaning or following curvy lines, can be dealt with using nonlinear vector fields. This article introduces a novel approach called the rotational obstacle avoidance method (ROAM) fo ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

VDM-based navigation for Delta-wing UAVs: Models, calibration, implementation

Pasquale Longobardi

Autonomous navigation of small UAVs is typically based on the integration of inertial navigation systems (INS) together with global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). However, GNSS signals can face various forms of interference affecting their continuous ...

EPFL2024

A lunar reconnaissance drone for cooperative exploration and high-resolution mapping of extreme locations

Erik Uythoven, Thomas Pfeiffer, Daniel Tataru, David Rodriguez Martinez

An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations remains, at best, ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Geometric Learning: Leveraging differential geometry for learning and control

Bernardo Fichera

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 ...

EPFL2024

Stability: a search for structure

Wouter Jongeneel

In this thesis we study stability from several viewpoints. After covering the practical importance, the rich history and the ever-growing list of manifestations of stability, we study the following. (i) (Statistical identification of stable dynamical syste ...

EPFL2024

VDMNav: Software Architecture for Aerodynamically Constrained Navigation on Small Fixed-Wing Drones

Jan Skaloud, Gabriel François Laupré

Navigation of drones is predominantly based on sensor fusion algorithms. Most of these algorithms make use of some form of Bayesian filtering with a majority employing an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), wherein inertial measurements are fused with a Global N ...

2024

Improving hand prosthesis control with advanced single-finger proportional decoding and robotic shared control

Vincent Alexandre Mendez

Myoelectric prostheses allow users to recover lost functionality by controlling a robotic device with their remaining muscle activity. Commercial devices usually use a two-recording-channel system placed on specific muscles to control a single degree of fr ...

EPFL2023

Hybrid Quadratic Programming - Pullback Bundle Dynamical Systems Control

Aude Billard, Bernardo Fichera

Dynamical System (DS)-based closed-loop control is a simple and effective way to generate reactive motion policies that well generalize to the robotic workspace, while retaining stability guarantees. Lately the formalism has been expanded in order to handl ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2023

Online active and dynamic object shape exploration with a multi-fingered robotic hand

Aude Billard, Kunpeng Yao, Farshad Khadivar, Xiao Gao

The sense of touch can provide a robot with a wealth of information about the contact region when interacting with an unknown environment. Nevertheless, utilizing touch information to plan exploration paths and adjust robot posture to improve task efficien ...

Elsevier2023

Training Efficient Controllers via Analytic Policy Gradient

Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza, Valentin Wüest

Control design for robotic systems is complex and often requires solving an optimization to follow a trajectory accurately. Online optimization approaches like Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been shown to achieve great tracking performance, but requir ...

New York2023

Motion Planning and Inertia Based Control for Impact Aware Manipulation

Aude Billard, Harshit Khurana

In this paper, we propose a metric called hitting flux which is used in the motion generation and controls for a robot manipulator to interact with the environment through a hitting or a striking motion. Given the task of placing a known object outside of ...

2023

Learning and optimization of anticipatory feedback controllers for robot manipulation

Hakan Girgin

Programming intelligent robots requires robust controllers that can achieve desired tasks while adapting to the changes in the task and the environment. In this thesis, we address the challenges in designing such adaptive and anticipatory feedback controll ...

EPFL2023

A multi-material robotic finger with integrated proprioceptive and tactile capabilities produced with a circular process

Antonia Georgopoulou Papadonikolaki, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

When developing or designing biomimetic robotic fingers with rigid and soft components and integrated sensors, fabrication is often a bottle-neck when assembling and casting processing techniques are used. This study introduces a thermoplastic multi-materi ...

IEEE2023

Data-driven Methods for Control: from Linear to Lifting

Yingzhao Lian

The progress towards intelligent systems and digitalization relies heavily on the use of automation technology. However, the growing diversity of control objects presents significant challenges for traditional control approaches, as they are highly depende ...

EPFL2023

DIET Controller: Dynamic Indoor Environment using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Arnab Chatterjee

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) Systems utilize much energy, accounting for 40% of total building energy use. The temperatures in buildings are commonly held within narrow limits, leading to higher energy use. Measurements from office bui ...

EPFL2023

Geometric and Learning Methods for Robots to Navigate in Human Crowds with Application to Smart Mobility Devices

David Julian Gonon

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 ...

EPFL2023