Related papers: Estimating Mass Distribution of Articulated Object…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…
Manipulation of objects by exploiting their contact with the environment can enhance both the dexterity and payload capability of robotic manipulators. A common way to manipulate heavy objects beyond the payload capability of a robot is to…
Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…
For robots to be a part of our daily life, they need to be able to navigate among crowds not only safely but also in a socially compliant fashion. This is a challenging problem because humans tend to navigate by implicitly cooperating with…
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in the last decades. One of the central challenges of manipulation is partial observability, as the agent usually does…
Precise robotic grasping is important for many industrial applications, such as assembly and palletizing, where the location of the object needs to be controlled and known. However, achieving precise grasps is challenging due to noise in…
Humans can determine a proper strategy to grasp an object according to the measured physical attributes or the prior knowledge of the object. This paper proposes an approach to determining the strategy of dexterous grasping by using an…
Manipulating arbitrary objects in unstructured environments is a significant challenge in robotics, primarily due to difficulties in determining an object's center of mass. This paper introduces U-GRAPH: Uncertainty-Guided Rotational Active…
In this paper, we consider the problem of non-prehensile manipulation using grasped objects. This problem is a superset of many common manipulation skills including instances of tool-use (e.g., grasped spatula flipping a burger) and…
Developing personal robots that can perform a diverse range of manipulation tasks in unstructured environments necessitates solving several challenges for robotic grasping systems. We take a step towards this broader goal by presenting the…
Inertial parameters characterise an object's motion under applied forces, and can provide strong priors for planning and control of robotic actions to manipulate the object. However, these parameters are not available a-priori in situations…
Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to…
Robots are increasingly expected to manipulate objects in ever more unstructured environments where the object properties have high perceptual uncertainty from any single sensory modality. This directly impacts successful object…
We propose a method to track the 6D pose of an object over time, while the object is under non-prehensile manipulation by a robot. At any given time during the manipulation of the object, we assume access to the robot joint controls and an…
Robots operating in domestic environments generally need to interact with articulated objects, such as doors, cabinets, dishwashers or fridges. In this work, we present a novel, probabilistic framework for modeling articulated objects as…
Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable'…
When working around other agents such as humans, it is important to model their perception capabilities to predict and make sense of their behavior. In this work, we consider agents whose perception capabilities are determined by their…
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…
Articulated and flexible objects constitute a challenge for robot manipulation tasks but are present in different real-world settings, including home and industrial environments. Current approaches to the manipulation of articulated and…