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 ...
The rise of robotic body augmentation brings forth new developments that will transform robotics, human-machine interaction, and wearable electronics. Extra robotic limbs, although building upon restorative technologies, bring their own set of challenges i ...
Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies.
Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives.
When gas leaks occur, the ...
In various robotics applications, the selection of function approximation methods greatly influences the feasibility and computational efficiency of algorithms. Tensor Networks (TNs), also referred to as tensor decomposition techniques, present a versatile ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Many robotics problems are formulated as optimization problems. However, most optimization solvers in robotics are locally optimal and the performance depends a lot on the initial guess. For challenging problems, the solver will often get stuck at poor loc ...
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 ...
