Related papers: Learning and Composing Primitive Skills for Dual-a…
Amidst the wide popularity of imitation learning algorithms in robotics, their properties regarding hyperparameter sensitivity, ease of training, data efficiency, and performance have not been well-studied in high-precision…
This paper presents a novel concept to support physically impaired humans in daily object manipulation tasks with a robot. Given a user's manipulation sequence, we propose a predictive model that uniquely casts the user's sequential…
Musculoskeletal robots that are based on pneumatic actuation have a variety of properties, such as compliance and back-drivability, that render them particularly appealing for human-robot collaboration. However, programming interactive and…
Shaping in humans and animals has been shown to be a powerful tool for learning complex tasks as compared to learning in a randomized fashion. This makes the problem less complex and enables one to solve the easier sub task at hand first.…
Humans throw and catch objects all the time. However, such a seemingly common skill introduces a lot of challenges for robots to achieve: The robots need to operate such dynamic actions at high-speed, collaborate precisely, and interact…
This paper introduces an upper limb postural optimization method for enhancing physical ergonomics and force manipulability during bimanual human-robot co-carrying tasks. Existing research typically emphasizes human safety or manipulative…
Learning from demonstration (LfD) is a powerful learning method to enable a robot to infer how to perform a task given one or more human demonstrations of the desired task. By learning from end-user demonstration rather than requiring that…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Imitation learning has been actively studied in recent years. In particular, skill acquisition by a robot with a fixed body, whose root link position and posture and camera angle of view do not change, has been realized in many cases. On…
In robotic grasping, objects are often occluded in ungraspable configurations such that no pregrasp pose can be found, eg large flat boxes on the table that can only be grasped from the side. Inspired by humans' bimanual manipulation, eg…
We present pyCub, an open-source physics-based simulation of the humanoid robot iCub, along with exercises to teach students the basics of humanoid robotics. Compared to existing iCub simulators (iCub SIM, iCub Gazebo), which require C++…
Humans possess an extraordinary ability to understand and execute complex manipulation tasks by interpreting abstract instruction manuals. For robots, however, this capability remains a substantial challenge, as they cannot interpret…
This article investigates the challenge of achieving functional tool-use grasping with high-DoF anthropomorphic hands, with the aim of enabling anthropomorphic hands to perform tasks that require human-like manipulation and tool-use.…
This paper presents a hierarchical framework based on deep reinforcement learning that learns a diversity of policies for humanoid balance control. Conventional zero moment point based controllers perform limited actions during…
Robotic tasks often require multiple manipulators to enhance task efficiency and speed, but this increases complexity in terms of collaboration, collision avoidance, and the expanded state-action space. To address these challenges, we…
This paper addresses two intertwined needs for collaborative robots operating in shop-floor environments. The first is the ability to perform complex manipulation operations, such as those on articulated or even flexible objects, in a way…
In this work, we propose algorithms and methods that enable learning dexterous object manipulation using simulated one- or two-armed robots equipped with multi-fingered hand end-effectors. Using a parallel GPU-accelerated physics simulator…
One of the most important challenges in robotics is producing accurate trajectories and controlling their dynamic parameters so that the robots can perform different tasks. The ability to provide such motion control is closely related to…
We present a novel, reusable and task-agnostic primitive for assessing the outcome of a force-interaction robotic skill, useful e.g.\ for applications such as quality control in industrial manufacturing. The proposed method is easily…
This paper introduces MobileH2R, a framework for learning generalizable vision-based human-to-mobile-robot (H2MR) handover skills. Unlike traditional fixed-base handovers, this task requires a mobile robot to reliably receive objects in a…