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Most of the grand challenges of humanity today involve complex agent-based systems, such as epidemiology, economics or ecology. However, remains as a pending task the challenge of identifying the general principles underlying their…
Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…
What do pickles and trampolines have in common? In this paper we show that while purchases for these products may seem innocuous, they risk revealing clues about customers' personal attributes - in this case, their race. As online retail…
This document is an introduction to designing a multiple degree of freedom robotic manipulator. The goal of the robot is to sort an object based upon the objects color. The robot will be a synthesis of several linkages, servo motors, an…
Autonomous robots in unstructured and dynamically changing retail environments have to master complex perception, knowledgeprocessing, and manipulation tasks. To enable them to act competently, we propose a framework based on three core…
Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface…
Efficient and safe retrieval of stacked objects in warehouse environments is a significant challenge due to complex spatial dependencies and structural inter-dependencies. Traditional vision-based methods excel at object localization but…
Exploration is a fundamental problem in robotics. While sampling-based planners have shown high performance, they are oftentimes compute intensive and can exhibit high variance. To this end, we propose to directly learn the underlying…
Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…
Biologists and scientists have been tackling the problem of marine life monitoring and fish stock estimation for many years now. Efforts are now directed to move towards non-intrusive methods, by utilizing specially designed underwater…
The Swarmathon is a swarm robotics programming challenge that engages college students from minority-serving institutions in NASA's Journey to Mars. Teams compete by programming a group of robots to search for, pick up, and drop off…
Robotic pick and place stands at the heart of autonomous manipulation. When conducted in cluttered or complex environments robots must jointly reason about the selected grasp and desired placement locations to ensure success. While several…
Many essential manipulation tasks - such as food preparation, surgery, and craftsmanship - remain intractable for autonomous robots. These tasks are characterized not only by contact-rich, force-sensitive dynamics, but also by their…
Robots performing tasks in warehouses provide the first example of wide-spread adoption of autonomous vehicles in transportation and logistics. The efficiency of these operations, which can vary widely in practice, are a key factor in the…
Automated bin-picking is a prerequisite for fully automated manufacturing and warehouses. To successfully pick an item from an unstructured bin the robot needs to first detect possible grasps for the objects, decide on the object to remove…
Agriculture remains a cornerstone of global health and economic sustainability, yet labor-intensive tasks such as harvesting high-value crops continue to face growing workforce shortages. Robotic harvesting systems offer a promising…
Learning by Asking (LBA) enables robots to identify knowledge gaps during task execution and acquire the missing information by asking targeted questions. However, different tasks often require different types of questions, and how to adapt…
The choice of a grasp plays a critical role in the success of downstream manipulation tasks. Consider a task of placing an object in a cluttered scene; the majority of possible grasps may not be suitable for the desired placement. In this…
We propose a dataset to study the influence of object-specific characteristics on human pick-and-place movements and compare the quality of the motion kinematics extracted by various sensors. This dataset is also suitable for promoting a…
Tackling complex team problems requires understanding each team member's skills in order to devise a task assignment maximizing the team performance. This paper proposes a novel quantitative model describing the decentralized process by…