Related papers: Manipulation in Clutter with Whole-Arm Tactile Sen…
Autonomous mobile manipulation offers a dual advantage of mobility provided by a mobile platform and dexterity afforded by the manipulator. In this paper, we present a whole-body optimal control framework to jointly solve the problems of…
Manipulation of objects by exploiting their contact with the environment can enhance both the dexterity and payload capability of robotic manipulators. A common way to manipulate heavy objects beyond the payload capability of a robot is to…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important…
The accumulation of litter is increasing in many places and is consequently becoming a problem that must be dealt with. In this paper, we present a manipulator robotic system to collect litter in outdoor environments. This system has three…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Many order fulfillment applications in logistics, such as packing, involve picking objects from unstructured piles before tightly arranging them in bins or shipping containers. Desirable robotic solutions in this space need to be low-cost,…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…
Robot-to-human object handover is an important step in many human robot collaboration tasks. A successful handover requires the robot to maintain a stable grasp on the object while making sure the human receives the object in a natural and…
Having the ability to estimate an object's properties through interaction will enable robots to manipulate novel objects. Object's dynamics, specifically the friction and inertial parameters have only been estimated in a lab environment…
While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…
The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid…
Tactile sensors are believed to be essential in robotic manipulation, and prior works often rely on experts to reason the sensor feedback and design a controller. With the recent advancement in data-driven approaches, complicated…
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…
Robotic navigation in dense, cluttered environments such as agricultural canopies presents significant challenges due to physical and visual occlusion caused by leaves and branches. Traditional vision-based or model-dependent approaches…
Biomimetic and compliant robotic hands offer the potential for human-like dexterity, but controlling them is challenging due to high dimensionality, complex contact interactions, and uncertainties in state estimation. Sampling-based model…
Controlling contacts is truly challenging, and this has been a major hurdle to deploying industrial robots into unstructured/human-centric environments. More specifically, the main challenges are: (i) how to ensure stability at all times;…
High-resolution tactile sensing can provide accurate information about local contact in contact-rich robotic tasks. However, the deployment of such tasks in unstructured environments remains under-investigated. To improve the robustness of…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…