Aquatic self-reconfigurable robots must assemble into desired shapes while ensuring safe interactions among multiple agents. This paper proposes a hybrid framework that combines distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for multi-agent shape formation and reconfiguration. Given a desired shape and target assignment, a distributed MPC scheme, solved via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), computes coordinated trajectories through local optimization and information exchange. To ensure safety in real time, distributed CBF-based filters are applied to enforce inter-agent collision avoidance. The proposed approach leverages the predictive capabilities of MPC to mitigate local minima, while CBFs provide formal safety guarantees despite the nonconvexity of the underlying optimization problem. Simulation results with up to 25 agents and experimental validation with four physical robots demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the framework.
Contact-rich robot manipulation requires physical interaction cues that are often invisible to cameras, making tactile sensing essential for robust control. However, scaling visuo-tactile robot learning remains difficult because real tactile interaction data are expensive to coll…
Geometry Foundation Models (GFMs) have substantially advanced monocular 3D reconstruction, yet extending this capability to 4D dynamic understanding remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing motion perception methods (e.g., sparse tracking, dense point-wise flow) treat motio…
In production processes for consumer products, assembly instructions are essential not only for planning but also for executing the production process. Likewise in robotics, it is crucial for an assembly robot to understand how components fit together and can be assembled. To fac…
Accurate yet low-latency depth is essential for radar-camera perception in autonomous systems. Cameras provide rich appearance but lack metric scale, whereas automotive radar offers metric range but is sparse and noisy. Many pipelines are multi-stage or depend on auxiliary annota…
Action-conditioned video world models predict future observations from an initial observation and an action signal. In robotics, actions influence future observations through two distinct processes: they are first realized into robot motion by the robot body and controller, and t…
The paper proposes a robot-agnostic compliant-control framework that extends the ROS control ecosystem with standardized joint and Cartesian command interfaces. It addresses a key limitation of existing control software: no reusable infrastructure for implementing compliant-contr…