Related papers: Non-Prehensile Manipulation in Clutter with Human-…

Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…

Motion planning framed as optimisation in structured latent spaces has recently emerged as competitive with traditional methods in terms of planning success while significantly outperforming them in terms of computational speed. However,…

Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…

Motivated by modern parallel computing applications, we consider the problem of scheduling parallel-task jobs with heterogeneous resource requirements in a cluster of machines. Each job consists of a set of tasks that can be processed in…

Humans subconsciously choose robust ways of selecting and using tools, for example, choosing a ladle over a flat spatula to serve meatballs. However, robustness under external disturbances remains underexplored in robotic tool-use planning.…

Robotic in-hand manipulation has been a long-standing challenge due to the complexity of modelling hand and object in contact and of coordinating finger motion for complex manipulation sequences. To address these challenges, the majority of…

In this work, we propose a novel shared autonomy framework to operate articulated robots. We provide strategies to design both the task-oriented hierarchical planning and policy shaping algorithms for efficient human-robot interactions in…

As legged robots take on roles in industrial and autonomous construction, collaborative loco-manipulation is crucial for handling large and heavy objects that exceed the capabilities of a single robot. However, ensuring the safety of these…

We consider a natural scheduling problem which arises in many distributed computing frameworks. Jobs with diverse resource requirements (e.g. memory requirements) arrive over time and must be served by a cluster of servers, each with a…

Tidy-up tasks by service robots in home environments are challenging in robotics applications because they involve various interactions with the environment. In particular, robots are required not only to grasp, move, and release various…

In this work, we address a task allocation problem for human multi-robot settings. Given a set of tasks to perform, we formulate a general Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem aiming at minimizing the overall execution time while…

We focus on the problem of designing an artificial agent (AI), capable of assisting a human user to complete a task. Our goal is to guide human users towards optimal task performance while keeping their cognitive load as low as possible.…

Human-in-the-loop guidance has emerged as an effective approach for enabling faster convergence in online reinforcement learning (RL) of complex real-world manipulation tasks. However, existing human-in-the-loop RL (HiL-RL) frameworks often…

Humans can effortlessly perform very complex, dexterous manipulation tasks by reacting to sensor observations. In contrast, robots can not perform reactive manipulation and they mostly operate in open-loop while interacting with their…

We present a framework for deformable object manipulation that interleaves planning and control, enabling complex manipulation tasks without relying on high-fidelity modeling or simulation. The key question we address is when should we use…

Efficient coordination and planning is essential for large-scale multi-agent systems that collaborate in a shared dynamic environment. Heuristic search methods or learning-based approaches often lack the guarantee on correctness and…

Robotic grasping is facing a variety of real-world uncertainties caused by non-static object states, unknown object properties, and cluttered object arrangements. The difficulty of grasping increases with the presence of more uncertainties,…

Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…

Object search -- the problem of finding a target object in a cluttered scene -- is essential to solve for many robotics applications in warehouse and household environments. However, cluttered environments entail that objects often occlude…

Human-level autonomous driving is an ever-elusive goal, with planning and decision making -- the cognitive functions that determine driving behavior -- posing the greatest challenge. Despite a proliferation of promising approaches, progress…