A number of outstanding problems in robotic motion and manipulation involve tasks where degrees of freedom (DoF), be they part of the robot, an object being manipulated, or the surrounding environment, cannot be accurately controlled by the actuators of the robot alone. Rather, they are also controlled by physical properties or interactions – contact, robot dynamics, actuator behavior – that ar...

We study the problem of multiple target tracking using multiple mobile robots. Our approach is to divide the cooperative multi-target tracking problem into two sub-problems: target tracking using a single mobile robot and on-line motion strategy design for multi-robot coordination. For single robot-based tracking, we address two key challenges: how to separate the egomotion of the robot from th...

The objective of this project is to use motion capture to track the motions of a human subject, above the waist, and then map these motions onto a humanoid robot in real-time, essentially making the robot a puppet and the human the puppeteer. This puppeteer will control the robot while wearing a virtual reality rig that allows the puppeteer to see what the robot sees. The robot that will be use...

We present an approach for synthesizing reactive robot motion plans, based on compilation to SyntaxGuided Synthesis (SyGuS) specifications. Our method reduces the motion planning problem to the problem of synthesizing a function that can choose the next robot action in response to the current state of the system. This technique offers reactivity not by generating new motion plans throughout dep...

Recent progress in robotics has a great potential, and we are considering to develop a dancing humanoid robot for entertainment robots. In this paper, we propose three fundamental methods of a dancing robot aimed at the sound feedback system in which a robot listens to music and automatically synthesizes dance motion based on the musical features. The first study analyzes the relationship betwe...

For a robot in a dynamic environment, the ability to detect motion is crucial. Although legs are arguably the most versatile means of locomotion for a robot, and thus the best suited to an unknown or changing domain, existing methods for motion detection either require that the robot have wheels or that its walking be extremely slow and tightly constrained. This paper presents a method for dete...

In this work we describe an autonomous soft-bodied robot that is both self-contained and capable of rapid, continuum-body motion. We detail the design, modeling, fabrication, and control of the soft fish, focusing on enabling the robot to perform rapid escape responses. The robot employs a compliant body with embedded actuators emulating the slender anatomical form of a fish. In addition, the r...

This paper presents a path planning algorithm for an articulated planar robot with a static obstacle. The algorithm selects a robot part, finds a path to its goal configuration by systematic configuration space search, drags the entire robot along the path using compliant motion, and repeats the cycle until every robot part reaches its goal. The planner is tested on 11,000 random problems, whic...