Many nonconvex problems in robotics can be relaxed into convex formulations via Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) that can be solved to global optimality. The practical quality of these solutions, however, critically depends on rounding them to rank-1 matrices, a condition that can be challenging to achieve. In this work, we focus on trace-constrained SDPs (TCSDPs), where the decision variables are Positive Semi-Definite (PSD) matrices with fixed trace values. We show that the latter can be used to design a gradient-based refinement procedure that projects relaxed SDP solutions toward rank-1, low-cost candidates. We also provide fixed-trace SDP relaxations for common robotic quantities, such as rotations and translations, and a modular virtual robot abstraction that simplifies modeling across different problem settings. We demonstrate that our trace-constrained SDP framework can be applied to many robotics tasks, and we showcase its effectiveness through simulations in Perspective-n-Point (PnP) estimation, hand-eye calibration, and dual-robot system calibration.

The paper proposes an efficient algebraic solution to the problem of forward kinematics for a general Stewart-Gough platform. The problem involves determining all possible postures of a mobile platform connected to a fixed base by six legs, given the leg lengths and the internal geometries of the platform and base. The problem is known to have 40 solutions (whether real or complex). The proposed algorithm consists of three main steps: (i) a specific sparse matrix of size 293x362 (the elimination template) is constructed from the coefficients of the polynomial system describing the platform's kinematics; (ii) the PLU decomposition of this matrix is used to construct a pair of 69x69 matrices; (iii) all 40 solutions (including complex ones) are obtained by computing the generalized eigenvectors of this matrix pair. The proposed algorithm is numerically robust, computationally efficient, and straightforward to implement - requiring only standard linear algebra decompositions. MATLAB, Julia, and Python implementations of the algorithm will be made publicly available.

Optimal control in general, and flatness-based control in particular, of robotic arms necessitate to compute the first and second time derivatives of the joint torques/forces required to achieve a desired motion. In view of the required computational efficiency, recursive $O(n)$-algorithms were proposed to this end. Aiming at compact yet efficient formulations, a Lie group formulation was recently proposed, making use of body-fixed and hybrid representation of twists and wrenches. In this paper a formulation is introduced using the spatial representation. The second-order inverse dynamics algorithm is accompanied by a fourth-order forward and inverse kinematics algorithm. An advantage of all Lie group formulations is that they can be parameterized in terms of vectorial quantities that are readily available. The method is demonstrated for the 7 DOF Franka Emika Panda robot.

This paper introduces the Visual Inverse Kinematics problem (VIK) to fill the gap between robot Inverse Kinematics (IK) and visual servo control. Different from the IK problem, the VIK problem seeks to find robot configurations subject to vision-based constraints, in addition to kinematic constraints. In this work, we develop a formulation of the VIK problem with a Field of View (FoV) constraint, enforcing the visibility of an object from a camera on the robot. Our proposed solution is based on the idea of adding a virtual kinematic chain connecting the physical robot and the object; the FoV constraint is then equivalent to a joint angle kinematic constraint. Along the way, we introduce multiple vision-based cost functions to fulfill different objectives. We solve this formulation of the VIK problem using a method that involves a semidefinite program (SDP) constraint followed by a rank minimization algorithm. The performance of this method for solving the VIK problem is validated through simulations.

Abstract-- We present an analytic solution to the 3D Dubins path problem for paths composed of an initial circular arc, a straight component, and a final circular arc. These are commonly called CSC paths. By modeling the start and goal configurations of the path as the base frame and final frame of an RRPRR manipulator, we treat this as an inverse kinematics problem. The kinematic features of the 3D Dubins path are built into the constraints of our manipulator model. Furthermore, we show that the number of solutions is not constant, with up to seven valid CSC path solutions even in non-singular regions.

In this paper, we propose a graph neural network, DisGNet, for learning the graph distance matrix to address the forward kinematics problem of the Gough-Stewart platform. DisGNet employs the k-FWL algorithm for message-passing, providing high expressiveness with a small parameter count, making it suitable for practical deployment. Additionally, we introduce the GPU-friendly Newton-Raphson method, an efficient parallelized optimization method executed on the GPU to refine DisGNet's output poses, achieving ultra-high-precision pose. This novel two-stage approach delivers ultra-high precision output while meeting real-time requirements. Our results indicate that on our dataset, DisGNet can achieves error accuracys below 1mm and 1deg at 79.8\% and 98.2\%, respectively. As executed on a GPU, our two-stage method can ensure the requirement for real-time computation. Codes are released at https://github.com/FLAMEZZ5201/DisGNet.

Abstract-- In this paper, we present a solution for robot arm-controlled agricultural spraying, handling the spraying task as a constrained prioritized 3T2R task. The solution presented in this paper introduces a prioritization between the translational and rotational degrees of freedom of the 3T2R task, and we discuss the utility of this kind of approach for both velocity and positional inverse kinematics, which relate to continuous and selective agricultural spraying applications respectively. Figure 1: The scenario in this paper involves mounting the spray wand for manual vineyard spraying as the endeffector I. Introduction The nozzle used to apply the spraying agent is an axis-symmetric tool. Agricultural robotics is a rapidly advancing research field that focuses on developing and deploying robotic technology for various agricultural tasks. The goal is to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of different velocity of the spraying frame, depicted in Figure 1, and agricultural procedures and address labor shortages.

Robot programming tools ranging from inverse kinematics (IK) to model predictive control (MPC) are most often described as constrained optimization problems. Even though there are currently many commercially-available second-order solvers, robotics literature recently focused on efficient implementations and improvements over these solvers for real-time robotic applications. However, most often, these implementations stay problem-specific and are not easy to access or implement, or do not exploit the geometric aspect of the robotics problems. In this work, we propose to solve these problems using a fast, easy-to-implement first-order method that fully exploits the geometric constraints via Euclidean projections, called Augmented Lagrangian Spectral Projected Gradient Descent (ALSPG). We show that 1. using projections instead of full constraints and gradients improves the performance of the solver and 2. ALSPG stays competitive to the standard second-order methods such as iLQR in the unconstrained case. We showcase these results with IK and motion planning problems on simulated examples and with an MPC problem on a 7-axis manipulator experiment.

The configuration manifolds of parallel manipulators exhibit more nonlinearity than serial manipulators. Qualitatively, they can be seen to possess extra folds. By projecting such manifolds onto spaces of engineering relevance, such as an output workspace or an input actuator space, these folds cast edges that exhibit nonsmooth behavior. For example, inside the global workspace bounds of a five-bar linkage appear several local workspace bounds that only constrain certain output modes of the mechanism. The presence of such boundaries, which manifest in both input and output projections, serve as a source of confusion when these projections are studied exclusively instead of the configuration manifold itself. Particularly, the design of nonsymmetric parallel manipulators has been confounded by the presence of exotic projections in their input and output spaces. In this paper, we represent the configuration space with a radius graph, then weight each edge by solving an optimization problem using homotopy continuation to quantify transmission quality. We then employ a graph path planner to approximate geodesics between configuration points that avoid regions of low transmission quality. Our methodology automatically generates paths capable of transitioning between non-neighboring output modes, a motion which involves osculating multiple workspace boundaries (local, global, or both). We apply our technique to two nonsymmetric five-bar examples that demonstrate how transmission properties and other characteristics of the workspace can be selected by switching output modes.

ALVIS is a reinforcement-based connectionist architecture that learns associative maps in continuous multidimensional environments. The discovered locations of positive and negative reinforcements are recorded in "do be" and "don't be" subnetworks, respectively. The outputs of the subnetworks relevant to the current goal are combined and compared with the current location to produce an error vector. This vector is backpropagated through a motor-perceptual mapping network.