Related papers: Active Perception and Modeling of Deformable Surfa…
In this work we study the problem of exploring surfaces and building compact 3D representations of the environment surrounding a robot through active perception. We propose an online probabilistic framework that merges visual and tactile…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
Ensuring safety and adapting to the user's behavior are of paramount importance in physical human-robot interaction. Thus, incorporating elastic actuators in the robot's mechanical design has become popular, since it offers intrinsic…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Interactive perception enables robots to manipulate the environment and objects to bring them into states that benefit the perception process. Deformable objects pose challenges to this due to significant manipulation difficulty and…
In this paper, we present a general approach to automatically visual-servo control the position and shape of a deformable object whose deformation parameters are unknown. The servo-control is achieved by online learning a model mapping…
This work presents a non-parametric spatio-temporal model for mapping human activity by mobile autonomous robots in a long-term context. Based on Variational Gaussian Process Regression, the model incorporates prior information of spatial…
In modeling spatial processes, a second-order stationarity assumption is often made. However, for spatial data observed on a vast domain, the covariance function often varies over space, leading to a heterogeneous spatial dependence…
Nonstationary Gaussian processes (GPs) are essential for modeling complex, locally heterogeneous spatial data. A common modeling approach is the spatial deformation method that warps the domain to recover isotropy. However, this static…
Deformable object manipulation remains a challenging task in robotics research. Conventional techniques for parameter inference and state estimation typically rely on a precise definition of the state space and its dynamics. While this is…
We propose a physics-based method to learn environmental fields (EFs) using a mobile robot. Common purely data-driven methods require prohibitively many measurements to accurately learn such complex EFs. Alternatively, physics-based models…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
Endowed with higher levels of autonomy, robots are required to perform increasingly complex manipulation tasks. Learning from demonstration is arising as a promising paradigm for transferring skills to robots. It allows to implicitly learn…
Multi-robot systems are essential for environmental monitoring, particularly for tracking spatial phenomena like pollution, soil minerals, and water salinity, and more. This study addresses the challenge of deploying a multi-robot team for…
This paper develops a probabilistic anticipation algorithm for dynamic objects observed by an autonomous robot in an urban environment. Predictive Gaussian mixture models are used due to their ability to probabilistically capture continuous…
Gaussian processes (GP) are a popular and powerful tool for spatial modelling of data, especially data that quantify environmental processes. However, in stationary form, whether covariance is isotropic or anisotropic, GPs may lack the…
This thesis presents a two-layer uniform facet elastic object for real-time simulation based on physics modeling method. It describes the elastic object procedural modeling algorithm with particle system from the simplest one-dimensional…
Direct design of a robot's rendered dynamics, such as in impedance control, is now a well-established control mode in uncertain environments. When the physical interaction port variables are not measured directly, dynamic and kinematic…
Despite the availability of ever more data enabled through modern sensor and computer technology, it still remains an open problem to learn dynamical systems in a sample-efficient way. We propose active learning strategies that leverage…
Physical human-robot interaction can improve human ergonomics, task efficiency, and the flexibility of automation, but often requires application-specific methods to detect human state and determine robot response. At the same time, many…