Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
Human-robot teams involve humans and robots collaborating to achieve tasks under various environmental conditions. Successful teaming requires robots to adapt autonomously in real-time to a human teammate's state. An important element of such adaptation is the ability for the robot to infer the tasks performed by their human teammates. Human-robot...
Legged robots have consistently captured our collective imagination through various forms of media, from Hollywood films, anime, and viral Youtube videos of robots accomplishing incredible feats of acrobatics. These robots have the potential to navigate our environments, capable of completing tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. However, developing controls...
Multiagent learning offers a rich framework to address challenging real-world problems such as remote exploration and healthcare coordination, which require autonomous agents to express elaborate interactions. To be effective in such systems, agents must collectively reason about and pursue high-level, long-term, and possibly nebulous objectives while adapting their strategy to...
Disaster response and surveillance operations will increasingly incorporate Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)s due to their cost-effectiveness and maneuverability. This trend has driven the research on small-sized quadcopters for varying indoor applications. Small-sized quadcopters' payload and computational capacity limit the usage of complex vision-based collision avoidance algorithms that are employed by...
Multiagent approaches are well suited to designing autonomous solutions for systems that feature complex interactions between many individuals such as in autonomous traffic systems and multi-robot exploration systems. However, creating autonomous agents that function effectively in these systems is a challenging task. In these complex environments, agents need informative reward...
Successful pruning relies on accurately identifying the 3D structure of tree branches and leaders. However, this task is arduous in an agricultural setting due to the complexity of scenes, the presence of clutter, and variable weather conditions. This project addresses these challenges by leveraging advancements in 2D image segmentation and...
Expressive motion has been found to be a highly effective tool in communicating intent and motivation in single robot human-robot interaction, but work in exploring how groups of robots can use motion in interactions with humans is relatively nascent. There are many additional complexities to consider expanding from single robot...
In recent years, model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an increasingly popular alternative to more traditional model-based or optimization-based control methods in solving robotic legged locomotion. However, deploying RL in the real world can be a significant undertaking. Constructing reward functions which compel controllers to learn the desired behavior...
Fingered robot hands are complicated systems made of three essential system components: its morphology, its actuation, and its software control. These system components are tightly coupled to each other. Due to this, it is hard to benchmark robot hand performance in a way to understand the contributions of the individual...
This project covers the construction of a Stereo Camera System, integration with a Velodyne VLP-16 LIDAR and the creation of dataset intended to aid in the development of vision algorithms for forestry applications. This project is the first step in a future multi-stage project to implement computer vision systems for...
Multi-robot teams offer promising solutions for many long term deployments in remote and dangerous domains, such as extraterrestrial or underseas exploration. However, long term deployments present many problems preventing robot teams from operating effectively. Learning over long time scales is makes it difficult to assign credit to robots' actions, as...
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
Commercial and public safety usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the National Airspace is currently restricted by federal regulation. The Federal Aeronautics Association is interested in modifying the restrictions; however, research is needed to study the human factor and required aptitude for a single human operating multiple UAVs. This Master’s...
This dissertation presents novel, field-activated smart material systems for the actuation and control of autonomous robots. Smart materials, a type of material whose properties can be changed with an external stimuli, represent a promising direction to expand upon existing robotic control and actuation methods, particularly in the sub-fields of soft...
Robotic Bipedal locomotion holds the potential for efficient, robust traversal of difficult terrain. The difficulty lies in the dynamics of locomotion which complicate control and motion planning. Bipedal locomotion dynamics are dimensionally large problems, extremely nonlinear, and operate on the limits of actuator capabilities, which limit the performance of generic...
As technologies like 3D printing increase in prevalence and capabilities, having a robot hand specifically designed for a given manipulation task also becomes more feasible. Leading to the question of how to design a robot hand for a specific manipulation task. To answer this question, I propose we need three...
We present a method for decentralized, multi-robot exploration in adverse environments where communication is minimal. A key conceptual feature of our method is enabling implicit coordination between robots by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a heuristic for planning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our method consists of...
As bipedal robots move ever closer to being integrated into all manner of real world envi-ronments there is a necessity to push their dynamic capabilities to meet or exceed those of humans and animals. Advancements must be made to address ordinary challenges that arise everyday in the same environments that...
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a popular tool for solving control tasks, with multiple works focusing on the complex and dynamic task of locomotion. However, the naive application of reinforcement learning to this problem often produces maladaptive policies that exploit the model or reward function. This results in behavior that...
A chair, once placed, will stay put until moved. Or will it? With the rise of technology being embeddable into everyday objects, what if that chair could move itself? Such robotic furniture has been featured in advertisements, art, and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. Existing methods for operating robotic furniture have...
When studying robot systems, it is common to ask about optimal approaches to accomplish a given task. In the context of mobile systems, particularly biomimetic systems, optimization tasks are closely related to the relevant dynamics of locomotion. In this thesis, building on prior work from the geometric mechanics community, we...
Human-robot teams are invaluable for mapping unknown environments, exploring difficult-to-reach areas, and manipulating inaccessible equipment. However, guiding autonomous robots requires dealing with these dynamic domains while synthesizing a significant amount of data and balancing competing objectives. Current mission planning methods often involve manually specifying low-level parameters of the mission, such...
In-hand manipulations consist of dexterous motions that come easy to humans but still pose a challenge to robotic systems. It is difficult to control finger motions in long complicated sequences due to high DOFs and intricate contact interactions. For such complex motions, in-hand manipulations have generally been broken into a...
Autonomous agents that sense, decide, act, and coordinate effectively with each other are critical in many real-world domains such as autonomous driving, search and rescue missions, air traffic management, and underwater or deep space exploration. All such domains share a key difficulty: though high-level mission goals are clear to system...
Human-safe Cobots are a popular replacement for industrial robots to automate manufacturing processes such like cutting and deburring that all involve accurate contour following across a workpiece surface while maintaining sufficient tool contact. Cobot arms are less expensive and human-safe but they have larger error motion in comparison when only...
Deep learning has recently revolutionized robot perception in many canonical robotic applications, such as autonomous driving. However, a similar transformation has yet to occur in more harsh environments including underwater and underground. This is due in part to the difficulty in deploying robots in these environments, which lack large real...
Labeling videos is costly, time-consuming and tedious. These costs can escalate in applications such as medical diagnosis or autonomous driving where we need domain expertise for annotation. Few-shot action recognition aims to solve this problem by annotation-efficient learning mechanisms.
This thesis presents MetaUVFS as the first Unsupervised Meta-learning algorithm for...
Relative to visual and audible communication, haptic perception is quiet, does not require eye contact, can be applied at any point on the human body, and can function in parallel with the other four human senses. Vibrotactile feedback is a method of haptic communication using vibrations applied to the skin....
Multi-robot systems are versatile and extremely capable of exploration tasks in complex environments. Increasingly sophisticated planners, which incorporate new features of a multi-robot system, are necessary for the operation of the systems. Marsupial robots are multi-robot systems consisting of a carrier robot (e.g., a ground vehicle), which is highly capable...
Anthropomorphism is described as the human tendency to see human-like shapes in the environment and robots have the potential to be anthropomorphized. However, it is unclear if anthropomorphic robots are effective in human-robot interactions (HRI). Using the context of hand sanitizer service as an application, this work assessed whether a...
This work presents a new approach to enable accurate machining cycle-time prediction. While conventional computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software estimates cycle times for given toolpaths, huge errors occur due to neglecting interpolator dynamics of numerical control (NC) systems. Typically, the machine changes its feedrate such as slowing down and speeding up...
Deep pressure therapy (DPT) is a method of anxiety relief that uses pressure sensations to lower the stress response produced in the brain, and functions in a manner similar to a hug. Heavily weighted blankets and weighted vests are most commonly used to apply DPT, though recent work has shown...
Reinforcement learning has made impressive strides in solving problems in challenging domains, but problems are increasingly being described with sparse rewards. Sparse rewards directly reduce the rate at which useful feedback is provided to the learner and make it difficult to distinguish between what specific actions led to the reception...
High-performance mechatronic systems are widely used in precision manufacturing equipment such as CNC machine tools, 3D-Printers, photolithography systems, industrial robots, and Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs). These equipment are utilized in producing parts and components for aviation, semiconductor, optics, and many other emerging industries, with geometric features and surface properties within...
This thesis presents a decentralized communication planning algorithm for cooperative terrain-based navigation (dec-TBN) with autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed algorithm uses forward simulation to approximate the value of communicating at each time step. The simulations are used to build a directed acyclic graph that can be searched to provide a...
Information gathering tasks, such as terrestrial search and rescue, aerial inspection, and marine monitoring, require robotic unmanned systems to make decisions on how to travel within an environment to maximize or minimize a path-dependent information objective function. The distribution of information throughout the environment is the result of various processes,...
Multiagent coordination has many real-world applications such as self-driving cars, inventory management, search and rescue, package delivery, traffic management, warehouse management, and transportation. These tasks are generally character-ized by a global team objective that is often temporally sparse - realized only upon completing an episode. The sparsity of the shared...
The effectiveness of robot autonomy is governed by the ability to make decisions based on online sensor measurements and a prior belief of the environment. Uncertainty in the environment introduces challenges to robotic decision making. This thesis address two key robot decision making problems: exploration and navigation. The robotic exploration...
This thesis seeks to make developing multi-robot comedy performances more accessible to developers and performers, and suggests the use of duo comedy for robot-run research experiments. It involved four main steps: technology development, experimental deployments in the general public, the development of the Multi-Robot Comedy Performance System, and an analysis...
Performing autonomous robotic tasks in the field, such as ocean monitoring and aerial surveillance, requires planning and executing paths in dynamic environments. In these uncertain and changing environments, it is not uncommon to see a large difference between the path planned by the robotic vehicle and the path that the...
This dissertation outlines the design and development of the first fully-soft, snake robot and its snake-inspired skin. Soft robotics takes advantage of soft materials to, among other things, improve robot interactions with complex, unstructured environments. Due to the interplay between the soft material and the environment, minor tweaks to the...
This dissertation incorporates coalition formation and probabilistic planning towards a domain-independent automated planning solution scalable to multiple heterogeneous robots in complex domains. The first research direction investigates the effectiveness of Task Fusion and introduces heuristics that improve task allocation and result in better quality plans, while requiring lower computational cost...
As robots are becoming more relevant to our lives, they are still having hard time accomplishing simple tasks such as picking and lifting. Problems that include environmental constraints, pose uncertainties and hardware noises restrain robots for grasping an object successfully from a perceivable environment. Many have looked into finding best...
While robotic systems may have once been relegated to structured environments and automation style tasks, in recent years these boundaries have begun to erode. As robots begin to operate in largely unstructured environments, it becomes more difficult for them to effectively interpret their surroundings. As sensor technology improves, the amount...
Legged locomotion in robotics benefits from engineered hardware dynamics such as configuration-dependent, nonlinear transmissions and compliance. This thesis introduces a novel cable driven leg that allows the design of configuration-dependent transmission ratios while also permitting the addition of compliance in line with the cables to achieve compliant legged locomotion. The...
Emerging applications for robotic data collection include ocean monitoring, emergency response and urban search and rescue. At the core of these applications is a robot's ability to make informed decisions on incomplete data. This dissertation addresses this problem by developing novel techniques for modeling and estimating structured environments using deep...
There is growing commercial interest in the use of multiagent systems in real world applications. Some examples include inventory management in warehouses, smart homes, planetary exploration, search and rescue, air-traffic management and autonomous transportation systems. However, multiagent coordination is an extremely challenging problem. First, information relevant for coordination is often...
Design and control of legged robots is a popular field in the pursuit of building robots that can be as mobile as humans. While much effort is put into understanding how to control the dynamics of these legs, less effort is focused on designing and controlling robot ankles. Ankles on...
When treating highly infectious diseases, patient compliance with caregiver recommendations is crucial. Many patients who contract Ebola Virus Disease have symptoms including vomiting and severe diarrhea and die from the resulting dehydration if they do not drink enough fluids. Telepresence robots are useful in the context of Ebola treatment for...
This thesis aims to determine the impact that Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices have on social interactions, and then improves the AAC user experience through a user focus design process. AAC devices enable people who cannot speak to communicate with others. Unfortunately, they are tedious to use and make...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...
Casting manipulation in robotics is the act of launching a tethered projectile and using it to interact with the environment. One such interaction is wrapping a target. In this work, we identify throwing and tether control parameters for successfully wrapping a target with an end-weighted cable, evolving through a set...
This work seeks to improve the knowledge surrounding geometric snake swimmers through both theoretical and practical means.
To begin, manufacturing techniques for a silicon-based pneumatic actuator were validated through experimentation. When inflated, the actuators exhibited an unanticipated elongation. In an attempt to confirm theoretical displacement predictions, a more accurate dynamic...
In this thesis, we introduce alignment-based algorithms for improving the performance of reinforcement learning solutions for problems where the reward signal cannot be collapsed into a single number. Many real world problems require an agent to balance performance, longevity, and safety, and do so across different timelines. The key to...
Collective migration in animal groups is often guided by distributed leader agents that influence their peers by modulating their motion behaviors. Distributed leadership is a promising navigation strategy for artificial swarms, but designing the leaders’ controllers is difficult due to the swarm’s collective emergent behaviors. The presented research formulates a...
Robotic limbs have been shown to enable mobility in unstructured, real-world terrain; they allow robots to step around cluttered environments, scramble up hills, carry heavy loads, and even perform acrobatics. However, mechanical limbs cannot operate as a means for such dynamic locomotion if they are simply treated as general articulated...
Soft robotics utilizes compliant materials (such as rubber) to make robots that are flexible and safe around humans, however these materials present many practical manufacturing challenges. Current fabrication methods use molding techniques which limits the soft robot designs which could be fabricated and impacts part consistency. This defense introduces a...
Deburring of machined parts is a crucial task in the aerospace and automotive industry. This process is still performed manually to a large extent due to the unpredictability of burr formation as well as the complex interactions between the human arm and the workpiece. Poor ergonomics, repetitive stress and strain...
Soft robots are designed to utilize their compliance and contortionistic abilities to both interact safely with their environment and move through it in ways a rigid robot cannot. To more completely achieve this, the robot should be made of as many soft components as possible. Here we present a completely...
In shared autonomy, a robot and human user both have some level of control in order to achieve a shared goal. Choosing the balance of control given to the user and the robot can be a challenging problem since different users have different preferences and vary in skill levels when...
Soft robotics is an emerging field that heavily relies on the ability of 3D printers. The limitations in soft robotics lie in the area of the 3D printers and the predictive models of the printed materials. There are currently no reliable models for optimizing the gradients required to create soft...
In the past half century, industrial robots have developed a strong presence in manufacturing. They now commonly perform tasks such as materials handling, assembly, welding, and painting. Unfortunately robotic machining tasks have seen limited deployments. The majority of machining robots are designed for soft materials like wood or plastic and...
There is a strong interest in the robotics community in learning how humans grasp and manipulate objects, partly because robots need to operate in human environments and partly because humans are currently much better in physical interaction tasks than robots. This thesis seeks to identify the human heuristics for grasping...
This thesis explores the use of human kinesthetic input to advance robotic grasp planning. It specifically focuses on identification of human heuristics of grasp similarity by extensive human-subject experiments. This heuristic is then utilized to develop a robust metric for identifying similar robotic grasps. The central hypothesis of this work...
Autonomous multiagent teams can be used in complex exploration tasks to both expedite the exploration and improve the efficiency. However, use of multiagent systems presents additional challenges. Specifically, in domains where the agents' actions are tightly coupled, coordinating multiple agents to achieve cooperative behavior at the group level is difficult....
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has grown out of traditional research and military applications and has captivated the commercial and consumer markets, showing the ability to perform a spectrum of autonomous functions. This technology has the capability of saving lives in search and rescue, fighting wildfires in environmental monitoring, and...
The ability to jump allows small robots to traverse rough terrain, clear large obstacles, and quickly reach elevated locations. These abilities have applications in a variety of areas such as, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and urban warfare. The primary focus in current state-of-the-art jumping robots has been on jumping...
Robots have the potential to protect health care workers, provide patient care, and ultimately save lives in infectious disease outbreaks. Nevertheless, infectious disease outbreak scenarios present unique technological and social challenges for robotics. This work explores what robots can and should do in the fight against infectious diseases. We present...
Numerous diseases and injuries can limit a person's ability to perform everyday tasks -- things like getting dressed, bathing, and eating. Anything that requires physical activity can be affected; even simple things like turning on the lights can become difficult or impossible. Until recently, the only way for a person...
Efficient coordination is desired for multi-robot systems in many scenarios. In this research, we first provide a multi-robot system to help human workers during tree fruit harvest. We present an auction-based method to coordinate a team of self-propelled bin carriers to retrieve fruit bins. Second, we propose a more general...
Underwater robots beneath ocean waves can benefit from feedforward control to reduce position error. This thesis proposes a method using Model Predictive Control (MPC) to predict and counteract future disturbances from an ocean wave field. The MPC state estimator employs a Linear Wave Theory (LWT) solver to approximate the component...
Direct red Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Turbine hybrid plants have the potential to dramatically increase power plant efficiency, decrease emissions, and provide fast response to transient loads. The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Hybrid Performance Project is an experimental hybrid SOFC plant, built at the National
Energy Technology Laboratory...
This thesis details the derivation and application of template-based controls on a bipedal robot, as well as a description of the software framework that enabled experimentation. The software framework uses a combination of open-source tools including ROS, OROCOS, EtherCAT, and Xenomai to create a real-time environment for the controllers. The...
Automating pick-and-place operations for large steel castings in a foundry is challenging, particularly from a perception point of view. Accurately estimating the identity and orientation of a given part is an open and complex problem, especially if that part sits in a bin of very similar parts. The problem is...
In a scenario where multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) run by different operators are conducting their independent missions in an urban environment, it is important that the limited airspace is shared in a fair manner. Clarity and uniformity in communicating mission specifications to a central controller is also crucial. This...
Many animals and robots move through the world by coupling cyclical changes in shape called gaits to an interaction with the environment. Because mobility is an important aspect of such robots, a key metric when evaluating design and performance of mobile robots is the efficiency of their optimal gaits. The...
Cephalopod-inspired soft robot arms have been studied as a new type of manipulator. These arms have been proposed for reach and grab tasks, underwater locomotion via swimming and walking, and robotic surgery. However, the capabilities of existing soft arms are limited to simple motions and light loads. Arm design has...
The orb web is a multipurpose structure---serving as a home for its inhabitant spider, as a prey capture device, and as a physical extension of the spider’s sensing abilities. Biologists are particularly interested in the spider’s ability to locate prey trapped in its web by sensing the vibrations induced from...
This thesis presents accurate and time-optimal smooth reference trajectory generation techniques for manufacturing equipment such as high-speed machine tools (MT) and industrial robots (IR). Typical machining tool-paths for MTs and IRs are defined as a series of discrete linear moves. Although Point-to-Point (P2P) feed motion can be generated by interpolating...
In order to enable better visualization and understanding of the effect of the robot's geometry and inertia on the robot's trajectories, this dissertation proposes to use geometric mechanics to bridge the gap between the physical motion of a robot and its mathematical structure. The main focus of this research is...
This thesis outlines the development of new elastomeric materials and manufacturing processes for soft robotics. Specifically, this work describes the development of custom material formulations for use in additive manufacturing, additive manufacturing processing techniques for silicone elastomers, and multi-component additive manufacturing techniques. Material synthesis and processing is a gap in...
As robotic systems become increasingly prevalent in our lives (e.g., by harvesting food, assisting with disaster response and defense, and transporting persons and our goods around the world) there is a growing need to ensure that they can cooperate to achieve their intended goals. Robotic cooperation in the real-world is...
There is growing commercial interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments, specifically for package delivery applications. However, the size, complexity and sheer numbers of expected UAVs makes conventional air traffic management that relies on human air traffic controllers infeasible. To enable UAVs to safely and...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
Cooperative multiagent systems are used as solution concepts in many application domains including air traffic control, satellite communications, and extra planetary exploration. As systems become more distributed and complex, we observe three phenomena. First, these systems cannot be accurately modeled, rendering traditional model based control methods inadequate. Second, system parameters...
Bipedal locomotion is a complex phenomenon to understand and control, making it difficult for legged robots to achieve the speed, agility, efficiency, and robustness of their animal counterparts. This thesis argues for the use of numerical optimization to investigate and implement bipedal control as it applies to biology, dynamical models,...
The objective of this study is to propose control strategies for legged robots to walk and run naturally like humans and animals. To achieve this goal, we use the spring-mass model for the legged robots to be able to create the same dynamics in the leg as humans and animals....