Related papers: Learning at the Ends: From Hand to Tool Affordance…
Dexterous multi-fingered hands can accomplish fine manipulation behaviors that are infeasible with simple robotic grippers. However, sophisticated multi-fingered hands are often expensive and fragile. Low-cost soft hands offer an appealing…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
When humans perform a task with an articulated object, they interact with the object only in a handful of ways, while the space of all possible interactions is nearly endless. This is because humans have prior knowledge about what…
Affordances - i.e. possibilities for action that an environment or objects in it provide - are important for robots operating in human environments to perceive. Existing approaches train such capabilities on annotated static images or…
Service robots are expected to autonomously and efficiently work in human-centric environments. For this type of robots, object perception and manipulation are challenging tasks due to need for accurate and real-time response. This paper…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Human manipulation skills represent a pinnacle of their voluntary motor functions, requiring the coordination of many degrees of freedom and processing of high-dimensional sensor input to achieve remarkable dexterity. Thus, we set out to…
Human-robot handovers are characterized by high uncertainty and poor structure of the problem that make them difficult tasks. While machine learning methods have shown promising results, their application to problems with large state…
Dexterous intelligence -- the ability to perform complex interactions with multi-fingered hands -- is a pinnacle of human physical intelligence and emergent higher-order cognitive skills. However, contrary to Moravec's paradox, dexterous…
Affordances describe the possibilities for an agent to perform actions with an object. While the significance of the affordance concept has been previously studied from varied perspectives, such as psychology and cognitive science, these…
The ability to use random objects as tools in a generalizable manner is a missing piece in robots' intelligence today to boost their versatility and problem-solving capabilities. State-of-the-art robotic tool usage methods focused on…
Human-robot handover is a fundamental yet challenging task in human-robot interaction and collaboration. Recently, remarkable progressions have been made in human-to-robot handovers of unknown objects by using learning-based grasp…
In order to *generalize* to various tasks in the wild, robotic agents will need a suitable representation (i.e., vision network) that enables the robot to predict optimal actions given high dimensional vision inputs. However, learning such…
Learning robot manipulation from human videos is appealing due to the scale and diversity of human demonstrations, but transferring such demonstrations to executable robot behavior remains challenging. Prior work either relies on robot data…
We propose a developmental approach that allows a robot to interpret and describe the actions of human agents by reusing previous experience. The robot first learns the association between words and object affordances by manipulating the…
In an attempt to confer robots with complex manipulation capabilities, dual-arm anthropomorphic systems have become an important research topic in the robotics community. Most approaches in the literature rely upon a great understanding of…
Affordance is crucial for intelligent robots in the context of object manipulation. In this paper, we argue that affordance should be task-/instruction-dependent, which is overlooked by many previous works. That is, different instructions…
Robots need to understand their environment to perform their task. If it is possible to pre-program a visual scene analysis process in closed environments, robots operating in an open environment would benefit from the ability to learn it…
Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…
Autonomous grasping remains challenging as unlike humans, robots do not possess a sophisticated sensing nor delicate interaction capability with the real environment. Among other efforts that tried to close the gap between them,…