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Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…

Soft and lightweight grippers have greatly enhanced the performance of robotic manipulators in handling complex objects with varying shape, texture, and stiffness. However, the combination of universal grasping with passive sensing…

Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping…

Quadruped robots are increasingly used in various applications due to their high mobility and ability to operate in diverse terrains. However, most available quadruped robots are primarily focused on mobility without object manipulation…

Soft robotic grippers are shown to be high effective for grasping unstructured objects with simple sensing and control strategies. However, they are still limited by their speed, sensing capabilities and actuation mechanism. Hence, their…

Constraining contacts to remain fixed on an object during manipulation limits the potential workspace size, as motion is subject to the hand's kinematic topology. Finger gaiting is one way to alleviate such restraints. It allows contacts to…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

A common limitation of autonomous tissue manipulation in robotic minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is the absence of force sensing and control at the tool level. Recently, our team has developed miniature force-sensing forceps that can…

Soft grippers are receiving growing attention due to their compliance-based interactive safety and dexterity. Hybrid gripper (soft actuators enhanced by rigid constraints) is a new trend in soft gripper design. With right structural…

Ease of programming is a key factor in making robots ubiquitous in unstructured environments. In this work, we present a sensorized gripper built with off-the-shelf parts, used to record human demonstrations of a box in box assembly task.…

Grasping objects with limited or no prior knowledge about them is a highly relevant skill in assistive robotics. Still, in this general setting, it has remained an open problem, especially when it comes to only partial observability and…

Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…

Grasping objects of different shapes and sizes - a foundational, effortless skill for humans - remains a challenging task in robotics. Although model-based approaches can predict stable grasp configurations for known object models, they…

Mechanically characterizing the human-machine interface is essential to understanding user behavior and optimizing wearable robot performance. This interface has been challenging to sensorize due to manufacturing complexity and non-linear…

An embodied agent constantly influences its environment and is influenced by it. We use the sensorimotor loop to model these interactions and thereby we can quantify different information flows in the system by various information theoretic…

Accurate in-hand pose estimation is crucial for robotic object manipulation, but visual occlusion remains a major challenge for vision-based approaches. This paper presents an approach to robotic in-hand object pose estimation, combining…

Embedding graphs in continous spaces is a key factor in designing and developing algorithms for automatic information extraction to be applied in diverse tasks (e.g., learning, inferring, predicting). The reliability of graph embeddings…

Many manipulation tasks, such as placement or within-hand manipulation, require the object's pose relative to a robot hand. The task is difficult when the hand significantly occludes the object. It is especially hard for adaptive hands, for…

Many objects commonly found in household and industrial environments are represented by cylindrical and cubic shapes. Thus, it is available for robots to manipulate them through the real-time detection of elliptic and rectangle shape…

We consider the problem of grasping deformable objects with soft shells using a robotic gripper. Such objects have a center-of-mass that changes dynamically and are fragile so prone to burst. Thus, it is difficult for robots to generate…