Related papers: Adapting Everyday Manipulation Skills to Varied Sc…
Humans demonstrate an impressive ability to acquire and generalize manipulation "tricks." Even from a single demonstration, such as using soup ladles to reach for distant objects, we can apply this skill to new scenarios involving different…
Future service robots working in human environments, such as kitchens, will face situations where they need to improvise. The usual tool for a given task might not be available and the robot will have to use some substitute tool. The robot…
Point clouds are a widely available and canonical data modality which convey the 3D geometry of a scene. Despite significant progress in classification and segmentation from point clouds, policy learning from such a modality remains…
Machine learning techniques have enabled robots to learn narrow, yet complex tasks and also perform broad, yet simple skills with a wide variety of objects. However, learning a model that can both perform complex tasks and generalize to…
A robot operating in a real-world environment needs to perform reasoning over a variety of sensor modalities such as vision, language and motion trajectories. However, it is extremely challenging to manually design features relating such…
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…
In this project we present a framework for building generalizable manipulation controller policies that map from raw input point clouds and segmentation masks to joint velocities. We took a traditional robotics approach, using point cloud…
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…
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,…
Humans are adept at learning new tasks by watching a few instructional videos. On the other hand, robots that learn new actions either require a lot of effort through trial and error, or use expert demonstrations that are challenging to…
In complex manipulation scenarios (e.g. tasks requiring complex interaction of two hands or in-hand manipulation), generalization is a hard problem. Current methods still either require a substantial amount of (supervised) training data and…
Reorienting objects by using supports is a practical yet challenging manipulation task. Owing to the intricate geometry of objects and the constrained feasible motions of the robot, multiple manipulation steps are required for object…
Deformable object manipulation presents a unique set of challenges in robotic manipulation by exhibiting high degrees of freedom and severe self-occlusion. State representation for materials that exhibit plastic behavior, like modeling clay…
In complex manipulation tasks, e.g., manipulation by pivoting, the motion of the object being manipulated has to satisfy path constraints that can change during the motion. Therefore, a single grasp may not be sufficient for the entire…
This paper proposes a novel method for understanding daily hand-object manipulation by developing computer vision-based techniques. Specifically, we focus on recognizing hand grasp types, object attributes and manipulation actions within an…
Long-horizon planning for robot manipulation is a challenging problem that requires reasoning about the effects of a sequence of actions on a physical 3D scene. While traditional task planning methods are shown to be effective for…
Constraint-based control approaches offer a flexible way to specify robotic manipulation tasks and execute them on robots with many degrees of freedom. However, the specification of task constraints and their associated priorities usually…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Vision-based learning methods provide promise for robots to learn complex manipulation tasks. However, how to generalize the learned manipulation skills to real-world interactions remains an open question. In this work, we study robotic…
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…