Belief space planning provides a principled framework to compute motion plans that explicitly gather information from sensing, as necessary, to reduce uncertainty about the robot and the environment. We consider the problem of planning in Gaussian belief spaces, which are parameterized in terms of mean states and covariances describing the uncertainty. In this work, we show that it is possible ...

Direct methods for trajectory optimization are widely used for planning locally optimal trajectories of robotic systems. Most state-of-the-art techniques treat the discontinuous dynamics of contact as discrete modes and restrict the search for a complete path to a specified sequence through these modes. Here we present a novel method for trajectory planning through contact that eliminates the r...

Provably safe and scalable multi-vehicle trajectory planning is an important and urgent problem. Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) reachability is an ideal tool for analyzing such safetycritical systems and has been successfully applied to several smallscale problems. However, a direct application of HJ reachability to multi-vehicle trajectory planning is often intractable due to the “curse of dimensionalit...

A major component of minimally invasive cochlear implantation is atraumatic scala tympani (ST) placement of the electrode array. This work reports on a semiautomatic planning paradigm that uses anatomical landmarks and cochlear surface models for cochleostomy target and insertion trajectory computation. The method was validated in a human whole head cadaver model (n = 10 ears). Cochleostomy tar...

Planning robot trajectory is a complex task that plays a significant role in design and application of robots in task space. The problem is formulated as a trajectory optimization problem which is fundamentally a constrained nonlinear optimization problem. Open-loop optimal control method is proposed as an approach for trajectory optimization of cable parallel manipulator for a given two-end-po...

In this paper, progress efforts towards an open control architecture for a PUMA 560 manipulator are described. The original UNIMATE architecture was modified to allow direct control, trajectory planning, task planning and external sensors handling by a network of dedicated personal computers. Meanwhile the new platform was tested by the implementation of one-PD-per-joint and computed torque con...

Assistive mobile robots that can navigate autonomously can greatly benefit people with mobility impairments. Several important problems need to be addressed for developing such an autonomous robot. This research focuses on one such problem, namely, motion planning in small-scale space. Small-scale space is space within the robot’s sensory horizon. Motion planning consists of finding a time-para...

The parallel robots seem to be one of the promising ways to improve accuracy and speed. At their development some new problems appear. This paper deals with design of direct kinematics for real-time path control of planar redundant parallel robots. The main reason for its using is a fact that the direct kinematics gives possibility to use Cartesian coordinates as against joint ones and by this ...