Related papers: Transfer of Tool Affordance and Manipulation Cues …
Does having visual priors (e.g. the ability to detect objects) facilitate learning to perform vision-based manipulation (e.g. picking up objects)? We study this problem under the framework of transfer learning, where the model is first…
Humans learn about objects via interaction and using multiple perceptions, such as vision, sound, and touch. While vision can provide information about an object's appearance, non-visual sensors, such as audio and haptics, can provide…
A generalist robot equipped with learned skills must be able to perform many tasks in many different environments. However, zero-shot generalization to new settings is not always possible. When the robot encounters a new environment or…
Humans are able to seamlessly visually imitate others, by inferring their intentions and using past experience to achieve the same end goal. In other words, we can parse complex semantic knowledge from raw video and efficiently translate…
Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks,…
One of the open challenges in designing robots that operate successfully in the unpredictable human environment is how to make them able to predict what actions they can perform on objects, and what their effects will be, i.e., the ability…
Robots are increasingly expected to manipulate objects in ever more unstructured environments where the object properties have high perceptual uncertainty from any single sensory modality. This directly impacts successful object…
We address the problem of executing tool-using manipulation skills in scenarios where the objects to be used may vary. We assume that point clouds of the tool and target object can be obtained, but no interpretation or further knowledge…
Object handover is a basic, but essential capability for robots interacting with humans in many applications, e.g., caring for the elderly and assisting workers in manufacturing workshops. It appears deceptively simple, as humans perform…
Selection of appropriate tools and use of them when performing daily tasks is a critical function for introducing robots for domestic applications. In previous studies, however, adaptability to target objects was limited, making it…
In this paper we explore the richness of information captured by the latent space of a vision-based generative model. The model combines unsupervised generative learning with a task-based performance predictor to learn and to exploit…
Deep robot vision models are widely used for recognizing objects from camera images, but shows poor performance when detecting objects at untrained positions. Although such problem can be alleviated by training with large datasets, the…
In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from…
Tool use is essential for enabling robots to perform complex real-world tasks, but learning such skills requires extensive datasets. While teleoperation is widely used, it is slow, delay-sensitive, and poorly suited for dynamic tasks. In…
We aim to develop an algorithm for robots to manipulate novel objects as tools for completing different task goals. An efficient and informative representation would facilitate the effectiveness and generalization of such algorithms. For…
This paper presents a data-efficient approach to learning transferable forward models for robotic push manipulation. Our approach extends our previous work on contact-based predictors by leveraging information on the pushed object's local…
Reasoning about object grasp affordances allows an autonomous agent to estimate the most suitable grasp to execute a task. While current approaches for estimating grasp affordances are effective, their prediction is driven by hypotheses on…
Perceiving and interacting with 3D articulated objects, such as cabinets, doors, and faucets, pose particular challenges for future home-assistant robots performing daily tasks in human environments. Besides parsing the articulated parts…
An appropriate user interface to collect human demonstration data for deformable object manipulation has been mostly overlooked in the literature. We present an interaction design for demonstrating cloth folding to robots. Users choose pick…
Safe human-to-robot handovers of unknown objects require accurate estimation of hand poses and object properties, such as shape, trajectory, and weight. Accurately estimating these properties requires the use of scanned 3D object models or…