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Robbins-van Wynsberghe, A.L. (author), Comes, M. (author)There are two dominant trends in the humanitarian care of 2019: the ‘technologizing of care’ and the centrality of the humanitarian principles. The concern, however, is that these two trends may conflict with one another. Faced with the growing use of drones in the humanitarian space there is need for ethical reflection to understand if this...journal article 2019
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Tavčar, Jože (author), Horvath, I. (author)Smart cyber-physical systems (S-CPSs) are complex engineered systems empowered by cyber-physical computing and equipped with the capability of reasoning, learning, adapting, and evolving. As an outcome of data-driven dynamic computing, reasoning capabilities, and the run-time obtained own knowledge, nonlinear and emergent behavior of S-CPSs...journal article 2019
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Wu, Di (author), Zhang, Yao (author), Ourak, Mouloud (author), Niu, Kenan (author), Dankelman, J. (author), Vander Poorten, Emmanuel B. (author)Catheters are increasingly being used to tackle problems in the cardiovascular system. However, positioning precision of the catheter tip is negatively affected by hysteresis. To ensure tissue damage due to imprecise positioning is avoided, hysteresis is to be understood and compensated for. This work investigates the feasibility to model...journal article 2021
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Actuating Eigenmanifolds of Conservative Mechanical Systems Via Bounded or Impulsive Control ActionsDella Santina, C. (author), Calzolari, Davide (author), Giordano, Alessandro Massimo (author), Albu-Schaffer, Alin (author)Eigenmanifolds are two-dimensional submanifolds of the state space, which generalize linear eigenspaces to nonlinear mechanical systems. Initializing a robot on an Eigenmanifold (or driving it there by control) yields hyper-efficient and regular oscillatory behaviors, called modal oscillations. This letter investigates the possibility of...journal article 2021
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Bonacchi, Luigi Bono (author), Roa, Maximo A. (author), Sesselmann, Anna (author), Loeffl, Florian (author), Albu-Schaffer, Alin (author), Della Santina, C. (author)Introducing elasticity in the mechanical design can endow robots with the ability of performing efficient and effective periodic motions. Yet, devising controllers that can take advantage of such elasticity is still an open challenge. This letter tackles an instance of this general problem, by proposing a control architecture for executing...journal article 2021
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Della Santina, C. (author), Albu-Schaeffer, Alin (author)Nonlinear modes are a well investigated concept in dynamical systems theory, extending the celebrated modal analysis of linear mechanical systems to nonlinear ones. This letter moves a first step in the direction of combining control theory and nonlinear modal analysis towards the implementation of hyper-efficient oscillatory behaviors in...journal article 2021
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Prendergast, J.M. (author), Balvert, Stephan (author), Driessen, Tom (author), Seth, A. (author), Peternel, L. (author)In this work, we explore using computational musculoskeletal modeling to equip an industrial collaborative robot with awareness of the internal state of a patient to safely deliver physical therapy. A major concern of robot-mediated physical therapy is that robots may unwittingly injure patients. For patients with shoulder injuries this...journal article 2021
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Roy, Spandan (author), Baldi, S. (author), Li, Peng (author), Narayanan, Viswa (author)Artificial-delay control is a method in which state and input measurements collected at an immediate past time instant (i.e. artificially delayed) are used to compensate the uncertain dynamics affecting the system at the current time. This work formulates an artificial-delay control method with adaptive gains in the presence of nonlinear ...journal article 2021
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Chen, Zhe (author), Alonso-Mora, J. (author), Bai, X. (author), Harabor, Daniel Damir (author), Stuckey, Peter James (author)Multi-agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD) is a challenging industrial problem where a team of robots is tasked with transporting a set of tasks, each from an initial location and each to a specified target location. Appearing in the context of automated warehouse logistics and automated mail sortation, MAPD requires first deciding which robot is...journal article 2021
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Ferreira de Brito, B.F. (author), Everett, Michael (author), How, Jonathan Patrick (author), Alonso-Mora, J. (author)Robotic navigation in environments shared with other robots or humans remains challenging because the intentions of the surrounding agents are not directly observable and the environment conditions are continuously changing. Local trajectory optimization methods, such as model predictive control (MPC), can deal with those changes but require...journal article 2021
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Zhu, H. (author), Martinez Claramunt, Francisco (author), Ferreira de Brito, B.F. (author), Alonso-Mora, J. (author)This paper presents a data-driven decentralized trajectory optimization approach for multi-robot motion planning in dynamic environments. When navigating in a shared space, each robot needs accurate motion predictions of neighboring robots to achieve predictive collision avoidance. These motion predictions can be obtained among robots by...journal article 2021
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de Groot, O.M. (author), Ferreira de Brito, B.F. (author), Ferranti, L. (author), Gavrila, D. (author), Alonso-Mora, J. (author)We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by incorporating chance constraints into the planning problem. This problem is not suitable for online optimization...journal article 2021
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Trumic, Maja (author), Della Santina, C. (author), Jovanovic, Kosta (author), Fagiolini, Adriano (author)Despite having proven successful in generating precise motions under dynamic conditions in highly deformable soft-bodied robots, model based techniques are also prone to robustness issues connected to the intrinsic uncertain nature of the dynamics of these systems. This letter aims at tackling this challenge, by extending the augmented rigid...journal article 2021
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Kulhanek, Jonas (author), Derner, Erik (author), Babuska, R. (author)Visual navigation is essential for many applications in robotics, from manipulation, through mobile robotics to automated driving. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides an elegant map-free approach integrating image processing, localization, and planning in one module, which can be trained and therefore optimized for a given environment....journal article 2021
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Derner, Erik (author), Kubalik, Jiri (author), Babuska, R. (author)Continual model learning for nonlinear dynamic systems, such as autonomous robots, presents several challenges. First, it tends to be computationally expensive as the amount of data collected by the robot quickly grows in time. Second, the model accuracy is impaired when data from repetitive motions prevail in the training set and outweigh...journal article 2021
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Domhof, J.F.M. (author), Kooij, J.F.P. (author), Gavrila, D. (author)We address joint extrinsic calibration of lidar, camera and radar sensors. To simplify calibration, we propose a single calibration target design for all three modalities, and implement our approach in an open-source tool with bindings to Robot Operating System (ROS). Our tool features three optimization configurations, namely using error...journal article 2021
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Qi, Jiaming (author), Ma, Guangfu (author), Zhu, J. (author), Zhou, Peng (author), Lyu, Yueyong (author), Zhang, Haibo (author), Navarro-Alarcon, David (author)The robotic manipulation of composite rigid-deformable objects (i.e., those with mixed nonhomogeneous stiffness properties) is a challenging problem with clear practical applications that, despite the recent progress in the field, it has not been sufficiently studied in the literature. To deal with this issue, in this article, we propose a...journal article 2022
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Stölzle, Maximilian (author), Miki, Takahiro (author), Gerdes, Levin (author), Azkarate, Martin (author), Hutter, Marco (author)Accurate and complete terrain maps enhance the awareness of autonomous robots and enable safe and optimal path planning. Rocks and topography often create occlusions and lead to missing elevation information in the Digital Elevation Map (DEM). Currently, these occluded areas are either fully avoided during motion planning or the missing...journal article 2022
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Wu, D. (author), Ha, Xuan Thao (author), Zhang, Yao (author), Ourak, Mouloud (author), Borghesan, Gianni (author), Niu, Kenan (author), Trauzettel, F. (author), Dankelman, J. (author), Menciassi, Arianna (author), Poorten, Emmanuel Vander (author)In cardiovascular interventions, when steering catheters and especially robotic catheters, great care should be paid to prevent applying too large forces on the vessel walls as this could dislodge calcifications, induce scars or even cause perforation. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel compliant motion control algorithm...journal article 2022
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Junge, Kai (author), Obayashi, Nana (author), Stella, F. (author), Della Santina, C. (author), Hughes, Josie (author)Biology provides many examples of how body adaption can be used to achieve a change in functionality. The feather star, an underwater crinoid that uses feather arms to locomote and feed, is one such system; it releases its arms to distract prey and vary its maneuverability to help escape predators. Using this crinoid as inspiration, we develop a...journal article 2022