Related papers: The robot skin placement problem: a new technique …
Base placement optimization (BPO) is a fundamental capability for mobile manipulation and has been researched for decades. However, it is still very challenging for some reasons. First, compared with humans, current robots are extremely…
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…
Distributing spatially located heterogeneous workloads is an important problem in parallel scientific computing. We investigate the problem of partitioning such workloads (represented as a matrix of non-negative integers) into rectangles,…
Creating mobile robots which are able to find and manipulate objects in large environments is an active topic of research. These robots not only need to be capable of searching for specific objects but also to estimate their poses often…
2D irregular shape packing is a necessary step to arrange UV patches of a 3D model within a texture atlas for memory-efficient appearance rendering in computer graphics. Being a joint, combinatorial decision-making problem involving all…
In the modular robot reconfiguration problem, we are given $n$ cube-shaped modules (or robots) as well as two configurations, i.e., placements of the $n$ modules so that their union is face-connected. The goal is to find a sequence of moves…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
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,…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
Physical design and production of Integrated Circuits (IC) is becoming increasingly more challenging as the sophistication in IC technology is steadily increasing. Placement has been one of the most critical steps in IC physical design.…
This paper presents a distributed approach for exploring and triangulating an unknown region using a multi- robot system. The objective is to produce a covering of an unknown workspace by a fixed number of robots such that the covered…
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…
Large-scale spatial data such as air quality, thermal conditions and location signatures play a vital role in a variety of applications. Collecting such data manually can be tedious and labour intensive. With the advancement of robotic…
Precise trajectory tracking for legged robots can be challenging due to their high degrees of freedom, unmodeled nonlinear dynamics, or random disturbances from the environment. A commonly adopted solution to overcome these challenges is to…
This paper considers the problem of rearrangement planning, i.e finding a sequence of manipulation actions that displace multiple objects from an initial configuration to a given goal configuration. Rearrangement is a critical skill for…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…
Before beginning any robot task, users must position the robot's base, a task that now depends entirely on user intuition. While slight perturbation is tolerable for robots with moveable bases, correcting the problem is imperative for…
The skin of humanoid robots often lacks human tactility and the inherent self-repair capability of biological tissues. Recently, researchers have grown a living, self-healing skin on a robot finger by subsequent culturing of human dermal…
Legged robots need to make contact with irregular surfaces, when operating in unstructured natural terrains. Representing and perceiving these areas to reason about potential contact between a robot and its surrounding environment, is still…