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doctoral thesis

Robot Manipulation with Geometric Algebra: A Unified Geometric Framework for Control and Optimization

Löw, Tobias  
2025

The ongoing transition of robotic systems from structured industrial settings to unstructured human-centric environments necessitates novel approaches to ensure adaptability, safety, and robustness. This thesis supports the view that geometrically coherent representations are pivotal in addressing these challenges. Therefore, this work presents a unified geometric framework for robot manipulation using Conformal Geometric Algebra (CGA), a mathematical language that seamlessly integrates geometric primitives (points, lines, planes, spheres) and rigid-body transformations (rotations, translations, scaling) into a single algebraic structure. By leveraging CGA's capacity to encode geometric intuition directly into algebraic operations, we address key challenges in robotics, including kinematics, dynamics, optimal control, and cooperative manipulation. Our results enable intuitive modeling of manipulation tasks through geometric primitives and their similarity transformations, which unify scaling, rotation, and translation. The presented modeling approaches generalize from single-, to dual-, and multi-arm systems. We show how this approach can be used in optimal control formulations as well as force control applications, where task objectives are formulated uniformly across primitives, avoiding case-specific adjustments and enabling compliant interactions. Practical contributions include the gafro library, an open-source CGA implementation tailored for robotics. The contributions not only provide theoretical advancements in geometric robotics but also deliver practical tools for real-world deployment. We demonstrate this by solving tasks around dual-arm admittance control and tactile ergodic surface coverage.

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Type
doctoral thesis
DOI
10.5075/epfl-thesis-11077
Author(s)
Löw, Tobias  

EPFL

Advisors
Thiran, Jean-Philippe  
•
Calinon, Sylvain  
Jury

Prof. Auke Ijspeert (président) ; Prof. Jean-Philippe Thiran, Dr Sylvain Calinon (directeurs) ; Dr Mohamed Bouri, Prof. Andreas Müller, Prof. Joan Lasenby (rapporteurs)

Date Issued

2025

Publisher

EPFL

Publisher place

Lausanne

Public defense year

2025-10-13

Thesis number

11077

Total of pages

246

Subjects

Geometric Algebra

•

Optimal Control

•

Cooperative Manipulation

•

Force Control

•

Dual-Arm Manipulation

EPFL units
LTS5  
Faculty
STI  
School
IEL  
Doctoral School
EDEE  
Available on Infoscience
October 6, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/254697
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