Assistive robots have the potential to support motor recovery after an injury as well as to alleviate the burden of physical tasks for both impaired and able-bodied individuals. Over the last few decades assistive robots have become increasingly more capable. Many can now provide task-specific assistance and can be safe...
Simple sensorimotor tasks, such as lifting a cup or balancing a tray, requires not only controlled motor output, but also the ability to accurately perceive sensory information. After a hemiparetic stroke, individuals often experience sensory deficits in addition to motor impairments. However, research on the extent of changes in sensory...
Machine learning-based techniques have shown great promises in perception, prediction, planning, and general decision-making for improving task performance of autonomous driving. Connectivity technology has also presented great potentials in improving the safety and efficiency of transportation systems by providing information beyond the perception and prediction capabilities of individual vehicles. However,...
Simple sensorimotor tasks, such as lifting a cup or balancing a tray, requires not only controlled motor output, but also the ability to accurately perceive sensory information. After a hemiparetic stroke, individuals often experience sensory deficits in addition to motor impairments. However, research on the extent of changes in sensory...
This thesis presents a new self-assembling robotic system that diverges from traditional approaches by enabling robots to build structures not constrained to a lattice and formed based on environmental conditions, rather than on a priori blueprints. Robot self-assembly is a class of behavior in swarm robotics in which many robots...
Even though a number of techniques have been developed for motion generation and perception, few of them focus on the computational efficiency and theoretical guarantees at the same time. Typically, improved guarantees come with increased complexity, making theoretically guaranteed methods challenging use in real-time applications. Thus, existing methods usually have...
The goal of this dissertation is to develop models, algorithms, and interaction protocols to improve the efficacy and quality of Human-Autonomy Interaction (HAI) in the domain of assistive robotics. In this domain, the most common control paradigm is that of manual teleoperation using control interfaces such as joysticks, switch-based head...
The field of robot design mostly focuses on careful construction of complex control and planning algorithms (e.g., tuning neural network weights) which bear sole responsibility for improving task performance, while the robot’s body is often assumed to be part of the environment. In nature, however, biological organisms co-evolve both their...
This research looks at the robotic shape formation problem, which is one of the fundamental problems in robotic swarm systems. Here, the task is to move a group of robots to form a user-specified shape. In this dissertation, the task of shape formation is divided to four problems: (i) using...
Robot dynamics are typically highly nonlinear and their control is a challenging research topic without a single overarching algorithm that demonstrates the best performance. In this thesis, I derive a nonlinear control algorithm that uses an analytical, closed-form solution to compute feedback with controllability-based guarantees for convergence. The proposed algorithm,...