Related papers: Embracing Contact: Pushing Multiple Objects with R…

The human hand has an inherent ability to manipulate and re-orientate objects without external assistance. As a consequence, we are able to operate tools and perform an array of actions using just one hand, without having to continuously…

Manipulating objects without grasping them enables more complex tasks, known as non-prehensile manipulation. Most previous methods only learn one manipulation skill, such as reach or push, and cannot achieve flexible object manipulation.In…

Autonomous dual-arm manipulation is an essential skill to deploy robots in unstructured scenarios. However, this is a challenging undertaking, particularly in terms of perception and planning. Unstructured scenarios are full of objects with…

To enable general-purpose robots, we will require the robot to operate daily articulated objects as humans do. Current robot manipulation has heavily relied on using a parallel gripper, which restricts the robot to a limited set of objects.…

Fast grasping is critical for mobile robots in logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Existing methods face fundamental challenges in impact stabilization under high-speed motion, real-time whole-body coordination, and…

While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…

Manipulation tasks are sequential in nature. Grasp selection approaches that take into account the con- straints at each task step are critical, since they allow to both (1) Identify grasps that likely require simple arm motions through the…

Dexterous robotic manipulation remains a longstanding challenge in robotics due to the high dimensionality of control spaces and the semantic complexity of object interaction. In this paper, we propose an object affordance-guided…

This paper presents a fixturing strategy for regrasping that does not require a physical fixture. To regrasp an object in a gripper, a robot pushes the object against external contact/s in the environment such that the external contact…

Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…

A major challenge for the realization of intelligent robots is to supply them with cognitive abilities in order to allow ordinary users to program them easily and intuitively. One way of such programming is teaching work tasks by…

Human-Robot collaboration in home and industrial workspaces is on the rise. However, the communication between robots and humans is a bottleneck. Although people use a combination of different types of gestures to complement speech, only a…

Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability…

The need for contact-rich tasks is rapidly growing in modern manufacturing settings. However, few traditional robotic assembly skills consider environmental constraints during task execution, and most of them use these constraints as…

Non-prehensile planar manipulation, including pushing and press-and-slide, is critical for diverse robotic tasks, but notoriously challenging due to hybrid contact mechanics, under-actuation, and asymmetric friction limits that…

Machine learning techniques have enabled robots to learn narrow, yet complex tasks and also perform broad, yet simple skills with a wide variety of objects. However, learning a model that can both perform complex tasks and generalize to…

Reaching-and-grasping is a fundamental skill for robotic manipulation, but existing methods usually train models on a specific gripper and cannot be reused on another gripper. In this paper, we propose a novel method that can learn a…

Picking unseen objects from clutter is a difficult problem because of the variability in objects (shape, size, and material) and occlusion due to clutter. As a result, it becomes difficult for grasping methods to segment the objects…

For robot arms to perform everyday tasks in unstructured environments, these robots must be able to manipulate a diverse range of objects. Today's robots often grasp objects with either soft grippers or rigid end-effectors. However, purely…

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shape and surface properties remains, however, challenging. Most current…