Related papers: Self-Supervised Damage-Avoiding Manipulation Strat…
While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…
Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…
The effectiveness of a robot manipulation to a large extent is determined by the speed of making this or that movement needed for carrying out the task. Accordingly to this the problem of optimal robot control is often subdivided into two…
Automating the segregation process is a need for every sector experiencing a high volume of materials handling, repetitive and exhaustive operations, in addition to risky exposures. Learning automated pick-and-place operations can be…
Humans have come to rely on machines for reducing excessive information to manageable representations. But this reliance can be abused -- strategic machines might craft representations that manipulate their users. How can a user make good…
Self-driving vehicles are a maturing technology with the potential to reshape mobility by enhancing the safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience of automotive transportation. Safety-critical tasks that must be executed by a…
Robotic manipulation involves actions where contacts occur between the robot and the objects. In this scope, the availability of physics-based engines allows motion planners to comprise dynamics between rigid bodies, which is necessary for…
We present a novel motion planning algorithm for transferring a liquid body from a source to a target container. Our approach uses a receding-horizon optimization strategy that takes into account fluid constraints and avoids collisions. In…
In this paper, we present a synergic learning algorithm to address the task of indirect manipulation of an unknown deformable tissue. Tissue manipulation is a common yet challenging task in various surgical interventions, which makes it a…
In robot manipulation, planning the motion of a robot manipulator to grasp an object is a fundamental problem. A manipulation planner needs to generate a trajectory of the manipulator arm to avoid obstacles in the environment and plan an…
Learning actions that are relevant to decision-making and can be executed effectively is a key problem in autonomous robotics. Current state-of-the-art action representations in robotics lack proper effect-driven learning of the robot's…
We automate soft robotic hand design iteration by co-optimizing design and control policy for dexterous manipulation skills in simulation. Our design iteration pipeline combines genetic algorithms and policy transfer to learn control…
Mathematical optimization is one of the cornerstones of modern engineering research and practice. Yet, throughout all application domains, mathematical optimization is, for the most part, considered to be a numerical discipline.…
Pruning is an essential agricultural practice for orchards. Proper pruning can promote healthier growth and optimize fruit production throughout the orchard's lifespan. Robot manipulators have been developed as an automated solution for…
Industrial manipulators have extensively collaborated with human operators to execute tasks, e.g., disassembly of end-of-use products, in intelligent remanufacturing. A safety task execution requires real-time path planning for the…
This work proposes an optimization-based manipulation planning framework where the objectives are learned functionals of signed-distance fields that represent objects in the scene. Most manipulation planning approaches rely on analytical…
In this paper we study the problem of designing periodic orbits for a special class of hybrid systems, namely mechanical systems with underactuated continuous dynamics and impulse events. We approach the problem by means of optimal control.…
Robotic automation is accelerating scientific discovery by reducing manual effort in laboratory workflows. However, precise manipulation of powders remains challenging, particularly in tasks such as transport that demand accuracy and…
Numerical optimization has become a popular approach to plan smooth motion trajectories for robots. However, when sharing space with humans, balancing properly safety, comfort and efficiency still remains challenging. This is notably the…
Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a unique and valuable human skill requiring sophisticated sensorimotor interaction with the environment while respecting stability constraints. Satisfying these constraints with generated motions is…