Related papers: Learning Robotic Manipulation of Granular Media

Current robotic manipulation requires reliable methods to predict whether a certain grasp on an object will be successful or not prior to its execution. Different methods and metrics have been developed for this purpose but there is still…

Grasping specific objects in complex and irregularly stacked scenes is still challenging for robotics. Because the robot is not only required to identify the object's grasping posture but also needs to reason the manipulation relationship…

Autonomous dual-arm manipulation is an essential skill to deploy robots in unstructured scenarios. However, this is a challenging undertaking, particularly in terms of perception and planning. Unstructured scenarios are full of objects with…

Deep learning has significantly advanced computer vision and natural language processing. While there have been some successes in robotics using deep learning, it has not been widely adopted. In this paper, we present a novel robotic grasp…

Manipulation tasks often consist of subtasks, each representing a distinct skill. Mastering these skills is essential for robots, as it enhances their autonomy, efficiency, adaptability, and ability to work in their environment. Learning…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

Characterizing forces on deformable objects intruding into sand and soil requires understanding the solid and fluid-like responses of such substrates and their effect on the state of the object. The most detailed studies of intrusion in dry…

Physics-based manipulation in clutter involves complex interaction between multiple objects. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning, from interaction in a physics simulator, manipulation skills to solve this multi-step…

Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…

A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…

Autonomous lander missions on extraterrestrial bodies will need to sample granular material while coping with domain shift, no matter how well a sampling strategy is tuned on Earth. This paper proposes an adaptive scooping strategy that…

We describe an algorithm for motion planning based on expert demonstrations of a skill. In order to teach robots to perform complex object manipulation tasks that can generalize robustly to new environments, we must (1) learn a…

The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific)…

Generating grasp poses is a crucial component for any robot object manipulation task. In this work, we formulate the problem of grasp generation as sampling a set of grasps using a variational autoencoder and assess and refine the sampled…

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…

Advancing the dynamic loco-manipulation capabilities of quadruped robots in complex terrains is crucial for performing diverse tasks. Specifically, dynamic ball manipulation in rugged environments presents two key challenges. The first is…

Humans leverage the dynamics of the environment and their own bodies to accomplish challenging tasks such as grasping an object while walking past it or pushing off a wall to turn a corner. Such tasks often involve switching dynamics as the…

This paper presents a framework that leverages pre-trained foundation models for robotic manipulation without domain-specific training. The framework integrates off-the-shelf models, combining multimodal perception from foundation models…

We present a deep imitation learning framework for robotic bimanual manipulation in a continuous state-action space. A core challenge is to generalize the manipulation skills to objects in different locations. We hypothesize that modeling…

For humans, the process of grasping an object relies heavily on rich tactile feedback. Most recent robotic grasping work, however, has been based only on visual input, and thus cannot easily benefit from feedback after initiating contact.…