Related papers: Active and Transfer Learning of Grasps by Sampling…

In-hand object manipulation is challenging to simulate due to complex contact dynamics, non-repetitive finger gaits, and the need to indirectly control unactuated objects. Further adapting a successful manipulation skill to new objects with…

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,…

Reliable robotic grasping, especially with deformable objects such as fruits, remains a challenging task due to underactuated contact interactions with a gripper, unknown object dynamics and geometries. In this study, we propose a…

We treat the problem of autonomous acquisition of manipulation skills where problem-solving strategies are initially available only for a narrow range of situations. We propose to extend the range of solvable situations by autonomous…

To coordinate actions with an interaction partner requires a constant exchange of sensorimotor signals. Humans acquire these skills in infancy and early childhood mostly by imitation learning and active engagement with a skilled partner.…

Tactile and kinesthetic perceptions are crucial for human dexterous manipulation, enabling reliable grasping of objects via proprioceptive sensorimotor integration. For robotic hands, even though acquiring such tactile and kinesthetic…

Transfer learning seeks to improve the generalization performance of a target task by exploiting the knowledge learned from a related source task. Central questions include deciding what information one should transfer and when transfer can…

Every time a person encounters an object with a given degree of familiarity, he/she immediately knows how to grasp it. Adaptation of the movement of the hand according to the object geometry happens effortlessly because of the accumulated…

Grasping an object is a matter of first moving a prehensile organ at some position in the world, and then managing the contact relationship between the prehensile organ and the object. Once the contact relationship has been established 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…

The ability of robots to grasp novel objects has industry applications in e-commerce order fulfillment and home service. Data-driven grasping policies have achieved success in learning general strategies for grasping arbitrary objects.…

Dexterous robotic hands are appealing for their agility and human-like morphology, yet their high degree of freedom makes learning to manipulate challenging. We introduce an approach for learning dexterous grasping. Our key idea is to embed…

Many objects, such as tools and household items, can be used only if grasped in a very specific way - grasped functionally. Often, a direct functional grasp is not possible, though. We propose a method for learning a dexterous pre-grasp…

In this paper, we study the problem of adapting manipulation trajectories involving grasped objects (e.g. tools) defined for a single grasp pose to novel grasp poses. A common approach to address this is to define a new trajectory for each…

Inspired by the remarkable ability of the infant visual learning system, a recent study collected first-person images from children to analyze the `training data' that they receive. We conduct a follow-up study that investigates two…

Grasping the same object in different postures is often necessary, especially when handling tools or stacked items. Due to unknown object properties and changes in grasping posture, the required grasping force is uncertain and variable.…

Learning-based approaches for robotic grasping using visual sensors typically require collecting a large size dataset, either manually labeled or by many trial and errors of a robotic manipulator in the real or simulated world. We propose a…

Grasping objects successfully from a single-view camera is crucial in many robot manipulation tasks. An approach to solve this problem is to leverage simulation to create large datasets of pairs of objects and grasp poses, and then learn a…

Tool use is an important milestone in the evolution of intelligence. In this paper, we investigate different modes of tool use that emerge in a reaching and dragging task. In this task, a jointed arm with a gripper must grab a tool (T, I,…

Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…