Related papers: Describing Physics For Physical Reasoning: Force-b…
Motion planning for urban environments with numerous moving agents can be viewed as a combinatorial problem. With passing an obstacle before, after, right or left, there are multiple options an autonomous vehicle could choose to execute.…
Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…
Motion planning trajectories for a multi-limbed robot to climb up walls requires a unique combination of constraints on torque, contact force, and posture. This paper focuses on motion planning for one particular setup wherein a six-legged…
Object rearrangement is a fundamental problem in robotics with various practical applications ranging from managing warehouses to cleaning and organizing home kitchens. While existing research has primarily focused on single-agent…
Robotic pick and place stands at the heart of autonomous manipulation. When conducted in cluttered or complex environments robots must jointly reason about the selected grasp and desired placement locations to ensure success. While several…
This paper presents a new technique for the design of approximate reasoning based controllers for dynamic physical systems with interacting goals. In this approach, goals are achieved based on a hierarchy defined by a control knowledge base…
Physical reasoning is important for effective robot manipulation. Recent work has investigated both vision and language modalities for physical reasoning; vision can reveal information about objects in the environment and language serves as…
Recent advances in vision, language, and multimodal learning have substantially accelerated progress in robotic foundation models, with robot manipulation remaining a central and challenging problem. This survey examines robot manipulation…
Machine common sense remains a broad, potentially unbounded problem in artificial intelligence (AI). There is a wide range of strategies that can be employed to make progress on this challenge. This article deals with the aspects of…
Prospection, the act of predicting the consequences of many possible futures, is intrinsic to human planning and action, and may even be at the root of consciousness. Surprisingly, this idea has been explored comparatively little in…
We address the problem of motion planning for a robotic manipulator with the task to place a grasped object in a cluttered environment. In this task, we need to locate a collision-free pose for the object that a) facilitates the stable…
Mental rotation -- the ability to compare objects seen from different viewpoints -- is a fundamental example of mental simulation and spatial world modeling in humans. Here we propose a mechanistic model of human mental rotation, leveraging…
It is well known that perspective alignment plays a major role in the planning and interpretation of spatial language. In order to understand the role of perspective alignment and the cognitive processes involved, we have made precise…
Spatial reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, enabling intuitive understanding and manipulation of objects in three-dimensional space. While foundation models demonstrate remarkable performance on some benchmarks, they still…
This article reviews contemporary methods for integrating force, including both proprioception and tactile sensing, in robot manipulation policy learning. We conduct a comparative analysis on various approaches for sensing force, data…
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…
Machine Learning algorithms are typically regarded as appropriate optimization schemes for minimizing risk functions that are constructed on the training set, which conveys statistical flavor to the corresponding learning problem. When the…
Reasoning about the behaviour of physical objects is a key capability of agents operating in physical worlds. Humans are very experienced in physical reasoning while it remains a major challenge for AI. To facilitate research addressing…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…
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,…