Related papers: Learning Robotic Manipulation of Granular Media

Predictive models are a crucial component of many robotic systems. Yet, constructing accurate predictive models for a variety of deformable objects, especially those with unknown physical properties, remains a significant challenge. This…

Diffusion generative models have demonstrated remarkable success in visual domains such as image and video generation. They have also recently emerged as a promising approach in robotics, especially in robot manipulations. Diffusion models…

Extrinsic manipulation, a technique that enables robots to leverage extrinsic resources for object manipulation, presents practical yet challenging scenarios. Particularly in the context of extrinsic manipulation on a supporting plane,…

Tissue manipulation is a frequently used fundamental subtask of any surgical procedures, and in some cases it may require the involvement of a surgeon's assistant. The complex dynamics of soft tissue as an unstructured environment is one of…

Dynamics models learned from visual observations have shown to be effective in various robotic manipulation tasks. One of the key questions for learning such dynamics models is what scene representation to use. Prior works typically assume…

Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…

From construction materials, such as sand or asphalt, to kitchen ingredients, like rice, sugar, or salt; the world is full of granular materials. Despite impressive progress in robotic manipulation, manipulating and interacting with…

Effectively integrating diverse sensory modalities is crucial for robotic manipulation. However, the typical approach of feature concatenation is often suboptimal: dominant modalities such as vision can overwhelm sparse but critical signals…

We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…

Granular media (e.g., cereal grains, plastic resin pellets, and pills) are ubiquitous in robotics-integrated industries, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical development. This prevalence mandates the accurate and efficient…

The control of granular materials, showing up in many industrial applications, is a challenging open research problem. Granular material systems are complex-behavior (as they could have solid-, fluid-, and gas-like behaviors) and…

Construction throughout history typically assumes that its blueprints and building blocks are pre-determined. However, recent work suggests that alternative approaches can enable new paradigms for structure formation. Aleatory…

Providing mobile robots with the ability to manipulate objects has, despite decades of research, remained a challenging problem. The problem is approachable in constrained environments where there is ample prior knowledge of the environment…

Nowadays, a number of grasping algorithms have been proposed, that can predict a candidate of grasp poses, even for unseen objects. This enables a robotic manipulator to pick-and-place such objects. However, some of the predicted grasp…

Despite decades of research, understanding human manipulation activities is, and has always been, one of the most attractive and challenging research topics in computer vision and robotics. Recognition and prediction of observed human…

Endowing robots with human-like physical reasoning abilities remains challenging. We argue that existing methods often disregard spatio-temporal relations and by using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that incorporate a relational inductive…

Multi-task learning of deformable object manipulation is a challenging problem in robot manipulation. Most previous works address this problem in a goal-conditioned way and adapt goal images to specify different tasks, which limits the…

Recent advances in vision, language, and multimodal learning have substantially accelerated progress in robotic foundation models, with robot manipulation remaining a central and challenging problem. This survey examines robot manipulation…

There is growing interest in automating agricultural tasks that require intricate and precise interaction with specialty crops, such as trees and vines. However, developing robotic solutions for crop manipulation remains a difficult…

This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…