A crucial challenge in robotics is achieving reliable results in spite of sensing and control uncertainty. A prominent strategy for dealing with uncertainty is to construct a feedback policy, where actions are chosen as a ...

Methods for resolving kinematic redundancies of manipulators by the effect on joint torque are examined. When the generalized inverse is formulated in terms of accelerations and incorporated into the dynamics, the ...

The industrial robot's principal advantage over traditional automation is programmability. Robots can perform arbitrary sequences of pre-stored motions or of motions computed as functions of sensory input. This paper ...

The goal of this thesis is to apply the computational approach to motor learning, i.e., describe the constraints that enable performance improvement with experience and also the constraints that must be satisfied by ...

This thesis presents the design, construction, control and evaluation of a novel force controlled actuator. Traditional force controlled actuators are designed from the premise that "Stiffer is better''. This approach ...

Free space is represented as a union of (possibly overlapping) generalized cones. An algorithm is presented which efficiently finds good collision free paths for convex polygonal bodies through space littered with ...

This paper presents algorithms for computing constraints on the position of an object due to the presence of obstacles. This problem arises in applications which require choosing how to arrange or move objects among ...

In this report, I discuss the use of vision to support concrete, everyday activity. I will argue that a variety of interesting tasks can be solved using simple and inexpensive vision systems. I will provide a number ...

A hierarchical representation for configuration space is presented, along with an algorithm for searching that space for collision-free paths. The detail of the algorithm are presented for polygonal obstacles and a ...

A program to control a robot manipulator for industrial assembly operations must take into account possible errors in parts placement and tolerances of the parts themselves. Previous approaches to this problem have been ...

We are investigating how to program robots so that they learn tasks from practice. One method, task-level learning, provides advantages over simply perfecting models of the robot's lower level systems. Task-level ...

This technical report describes Team MIT s approach to theDARPA Urban Challenge. We have developed a novel strategy forusing many inexpensive sensors, mounted on the vehicle periphery,and calibrated with a new cross-­modal ...

This paper reports progress toward the development of a representation of significant surface changes in dense depth maps. We call the representation the Surface Primal Sketch by analogy with representation of intensity ...

The Workshop for the Design and Control of Dexterous Hands was held at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on November 5-6, 1981. Outside experts were brought together to discuss four topics: kinematics of hands, ...