Soft robot shape estimation with IMUs leveraging PCC kinematics for drift filtering

The control possibilities for soft robots have long been hindered by the need for reliable methods to estimate their configuration. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) can solve this challenge, but they are affected by well-known drift issues. This letter proposes a method to eliminate this limitation by leveraging the Piecewise Constant...

Do You Need a Hand?: a Bimanual Robotic Dressing Assistance Scheme

Developing physically assistive robots capable of dressing assistance has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the elderly and disabled population. However, most robotics dressing strategies considered a single robot only, which greatly limited the performance of the dressing assistance. In fact, healthcare professionals...

Reconstructing occluded Elevation Information in Terrain Maps with Self-supervised Learning

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...

Challenges and Outlook in Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and health-care sectors. However, compared to rigid object manipulation, the manipulation of deformable objects is...

Hysteresis Modeling of Robotic Catheters based on Long Short-Term Memory Network for Improved Environment Reconstruction

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...

A Joint Extrinsic Calibration Tool for Radar, Camera and Lidar

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...