Related papers: A Model Predictive Approach for Online Mobile Mani…
Safe autonomous navigation in unknown environments is an important problem for mobile robots. This paper proposes techniques to learn the dynamics model of a mobile robot from trajectory data and synthesize a tracking controller with safety…
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…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…
Robots are expected to replace menial tasks such as housework. Some of these tasks include nonprehensile manipulation performed without grasping objects. Nonprehensile manipulation is very difficult because it requires considering the…
Context plays a significant role in the generation of motion for dynamic agents in interactive environments. This work proposes a modular method that utilises a learned model of the environment for motion prediction. This modularity…
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…
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…
We present the design of a low-cost wheeled mobile robot, and an analytical model for predicting its motion under the influence of motor torques and friction forces. Using our proposed model, we show how to analytically compute the gradient…
We consider a nonprehensile manipulation task in which a mobile manipulator must balance objects on its end effector without grasping them -- known as the waiter's problem -- and move to a desired location while avoiding static and dynamic…
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…
Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in…
The ability to model the underlying dynamics of visual scenes and reason about the future is central to human intelligence. Many attempts have been made to empower intelligent systems with such physical understanding and prediction…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects is a difficult problem especially because of the complexity of the many different ways an object can deform. Searching such a high dimensional state space makes it difficult to recognize, track,…
This paper proposes a technique to manipulate an object with a nonholonomic mobile robot by pushing, which is a nonprehensile manipulation motion primitive. Such a primitive involves unilateral constraints associated with the friction…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
Proactive robot assistance enables a robot to anticipate and provide for a user's needs without being explicitly asked. We formulate proactive assistance as the problem of the robot anticipating temporal patterns of object movements…
Tissue manipulation is a frequently used fundamental subtask of any surgical procedures, and in some cases it may require the involvement of a surgeon's assistant. The complex dynamics of soft tissue as an unstructured environment is one of…
Non-contact manipulation is a promising methodology in robotics, offering a wide range of scientific and industrial applications. Among the proposed approaches, airflow stands out for its ability to project across considerable distances and…
Mobile manipulators require coordinated control between navigation and manipulation to accomplish tasks. Typically, coordinated mobile manipulation behaviors have base navigation to approach the goal followed by arm manipulation to reach…