In this paper, we describe the realization and control of robotic end-effectors that are designed to achieve high operational versatility with limited constructive complexity. The design of such endeffectors, which can be regarded either as low-complexity robot hands or as highly versatile robot grippers, is based on the intentional exploitation of nonholonomic effects that occur in rolling. Wh...

A method is presented for planning obstacle-avoiding paths for a system which exhibits nonholonomic constraints. The method is based on the use of harmonic functions. Linear constraints on the velocity of a nonholonomic system can be directly expressed as Neumann boundary conditions for a harmonic function. Such boundary conditions are easily represented in a resistive network. The resulting po...

The autonomous vehicle is an automated system equipped with features like environment perception, decision-making, motion planning, and control and execution technology. Navigating in an unstructured and complex environment is a huge challenge for autonomous vehicles, due to the irregular shape of road, the requirement of real-time planning, and the nonholonomic constraints of vehicle. This pap...

We propose a framework for synthesizing real-time trajectories for a wide class of coordinating multi-agent systems. The class of problems considered is characterized by the ability to decompose a given formation objective into an equivalent set of lower dimensional problems. These include the so called radar deception problem and the formation control problems that fall under formation keeping...

The focus of the paper is to solve the stability problem of a multi-agent system composed of nonholonomic vehicles. The multi-vehicle formation is achieved following a first step where targets are identified and attractive sets circumscribing this are constructed. In a second step, the initial position and orientation of each agent is specified. In a last stage, a decentralized controller integ...

A planning methodology for nonholonomic mobile platforms with manipulators in the presence of obstacles is developed that employs smooth and continuous functions such as polynomials. The method yields admissible input trajectories that drive both the manipulator and the platform to a desired configuration and is based on mapping the nonholonomic constraint to a space where it can be satisfied t...

Motion planning is a fundamental problem in robotics. It comes in a variety of forms, but the simplest version is as follows. We are given a robot system B, which may consist of several rigid objects attached to each other through various joints, hinges, and links, or moving independently, and a 2D or 3D environment V cluttered with obstacles. We assume that the shape and location of the obstac...

In this work, we propose a new approach for motion planning for nonholonomic car-like robots which is based on a Customizable PRM (C-PRM). A major advantage of our approach is that it enables the same roadmap to be efficiently utilized for car-like robots with different turning radii, which need not be known before query time. Our C-PRM-based approach first builds a so-called control roadmap wh...

This paper presents a general, nonholonomic dextrous manipulation and finger gaiting technique for robotic grasping problems. This method is general in that it is independent of the geometry of the grasped object and independent of the morphology of the mainipulating hand. This method is based upon a nonholonomic motion planning method for smooth system that has been extended to a certain class...