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The ability to invent new tools has been identified as an important facet of our ability as a species to problem solve in dynamic and novel environments. While the use of tools by artificial agents presents a challenging task and has been…
Endowing robots with tool design abilities is critical for enabling them to solve complex manipulation tasks that would otherwise be intractable. While recent generative frameworks can automatically synthesize task settings, such as 3D…
The mathematical software system polymake provides a wide range of functions for convex polytopes, simplicial complexes, and other objects. A large part of this paper is dedicated to a tutorial which exemplifies the usage. Later sections…
Humans use tools to complete impact-aware tasks such as hammering a nail or playing tennis. The postures adopted to use these tools can significantly influence the performance of these tasks, where the force or velocity of the hand holding…
Imagine a robot that can assemble a functional product from the individual parts presented in any configuration to the robot. Designing such a robotic system is a complex problem which presents several open challenges. To bypass these…
Learning to use tools to solve a variety of tasks is an innate ability of humans and has been observed of animals in the wild. However, the underlying mechanisms that are required to learn to use tools are abstract and widely contested in…
How should a robot direct active vision so as to ensure reliable grasping? We answer this question for the case of dexterous grasping of unfamiliar objects. By dexterous grasping we simply mean grasping by any hand with more than two…
Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…
Assembling parts into an object is a combinatorial problem that arises in a variety of contexts in the real world and involves numerous applications in science and engineering. Previous related work tackles limited cases with identical unit…
AI-based design tools are proliferating in professional software to assist engineering and industrial designers in complex manufacturing and design tasks. These tools take on more agentic roles than traditional computer-aided design tools…
Automated assembly of 3D fractures is essential in orthopedics, archaeology, and our daily life. This paper presents Jigsaw, a novel framework for assembling physically broken 3D objects from multiple pieces. Our approach leverages…
The construction industry faces productivity stagnation, skilled labor shortages, and safety concerns. While robotic automation offers solutions, construction robots struggle to adapt to unstructured, dynamic sites. Central to this is…
This paper presents an overview of the evolution of local features from handcrafted to deep-learning-based methods, followed by a discussion of several benchmarks and papers evaluating such local features. Our investigations are motivated…
Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…
Many animals, and an increasing number of artificial agents, display sophisticated capabilities to perceive and manipulate objects. But human beings remain distinctive in their capacity for flexible, creative tool use -- using objects in…
The rapidly developing robotics industry demands structures with novel mechanical functions. Traditional approaches, developing new materials and designing new structures, face two challenges. Highly complex force-displacement functions can…
The tools for personal digital fabrication (DF) are on the verge of reaching mass-adoption beyond technology enthusiasts, empowering consumers to fabricate personalized artifacts. We argue that to achieve similar outreach and impact as…
Robots sense, move and act in the physical world. It is therefore natural that algorithmic problems in robotics and automation have a geometric component, often central to the problem. Below we review ten challenging problems at the…
Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is a prerequisite for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. This means that the robots need to be capable of generating behavior that aligns with human expectations and,…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…