Related papers: Using Contact to Increase Robot Performance for Gl…
Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires planners to reason jointly about free-space motion and sustained, frictional contact with the environment. Existing (local) planning and simulation frameworks typically separate…
Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…
Robot-to-human object handover is an important step in many human robot collaboration tasks. A successful handover requires the robot to maintain a stable grasp on the object while making sure the human receives the object in a natural and…
Learning contact-rich, robotic manipulation skills is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensionality of the state and action space as well as uncertainty from noisy sensors and inaccurate motor control. To combat these factors and…
This paper investigates one of the most challenging tasks in dynamic manipulation -- catching large-momentum moving objects. Beyond the realm of quasi-static manipulation, dealing with highly dynamic objects can significantly improve the…
Manipulation planning and control are relevant building blocks of a robotic system and their tight integration is a key factor to improve robot autonomy and allows robots to perform manipulation tasks of increasing complexity, such as those…
Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively…
Optimizing the morphologies and the controllers that adapt to various tasks is a critical issue in the field of robot design, aka. embodied intelligence. Previous works typically model it as a joint optimization problem and use search-based…
Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider dynamics when planning a contact sequence. Traditional contact…
Robotic grasping is a fundamental skill across all domains of robot applications. There is a large body of research for grasping objects in table-top scenarios, where finding suitable grasps is the main challenge. In this work, we are…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…
This paper presents a novel contact-implicit trajectory optimization method using an analytically solvable contact model to enable planning of interactions with hard, soft, and slippery environments. Specifically, we propose a novel contact…
Most animal and human locomotion behaviors for solving complex tasks involve dynamic motions and rich contact interaction. In fact, complex maneuvers need to consider dynamic movement and contact events at the same time. We present a…
Humans show specialized strategies for efficient collaboration. Transferring similar strategies to humanoid robots can improve their capability to interact with other agents, leading the way to complex collaborative scenarios with multiple…
Sense of touch that allows robots to detect contact and measure interaction forces enables them to perform challenging tasks such as grasping fragile objects or using tools. Tactile sensors in theory can equip the robots with such…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. However, it is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. While…
We present an efficient spacetime optimization method to automatically generate animations for a general volumetric, elastically deformable body. Our approach can model the interactions between the body and the environment and automatically…
Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…