Related papers: CLASH WRIST -- A hardware to increase the capabili…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments pose significant robustness challenges for robot learning, where unexpected collisions can cause damage and hinder policy acquisition. Existing soft end-effectors face fundamental…
This article presents a new hand architecture with three under-actuated fingers. Each finger performs spatial movements to achieve more complex and varied grasping than the existing planar-movement fingers. The purpose of this hand is to…
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…
Without finger function, people with C5-7 spinal cord injury (SCI) regularly utilize wrist extension to passively close the fingers and thumb together for grasping. Wearable assistive grasping devices often focus on this familiar…
Control barrier functions have been demonstrated to be a useful method of ensuring constraint satisfaction for a wide class of controllers, however existing results are mostly restricted to continuous time systems of relative degree one.…
Expressivity--the use of multiple modalities to convey internal state and intent of a robot--is critical for interaction. Yet, due to cost, safety, and other constraints, many robots lack high degrees of physical expressivity. This paper…
Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
This paper addresses the problem of selecting from a choice of possible grasps, so that impact forces will be minimised if a collision occurs while the robot is moving the grasped object along a post-grasp trajectory. Such considerations…
Development of dexterous manipulation hardware has primarily focused on hands and grippers. However, these end-effectors are often paired with bulky and highly stiff wrists that limit performance in human environments. More designs have…
Accurate pre-contact grasp force selection is critical for safe and reliable robotic manipulation. Adaptive controllers regulate force after contact but still require a reasonable initial estimate. Starting a grasp with too little force…
Autonomous grasping remains challenging as unlike humans, robots do not possess a sophisticated sensing nor delicate interaction capability with the real environment. Among other efforts that tried to close the gap between them,…
For successful object manipulation with robotic hands, it is important to ensure that the object remains in the grasp at all times. In addition to grasp constraints associated with slipping and singular hand configurations, excessive…
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…
Robotic manipulation in unstructured, humancentric environments poses a dual challenge: achieving the precision need for delicate free-space operation while ensuring safety during unexpected contact events. Traditional wrists struggle to…
Robotic grasping in cluttered environments is often infeasible due to obstacles preventing possible grasps. Then, pre-grasping manipulation like shifting or pushing an object becomes necessary. We developed an algorithm that can learn, in…
This study presents the design and the kinematic optimization of a novel, underactuated, linkage-based robotic hand exoskeleton to assist users in performing grasping tasks. The device has been designed to apply only normal forces to the…
Most robotic hands and grippers rely on actuators with large gearboxes and force sensors for controlling gripping force. However, this might not be ideal for tasks which require the robot to interact with an unstructured and/or unknown…
This paper presents a soft robot finger capable of adaptive-twist deformation to grasp objects by wrapping them. For a soft hand to grasp and pick-up one object from densely contained multiple objects, a soft finger requires the…
Robots are widely deployed in space environments because of their versatility and robustness. However, adverse gravity conditions and challenging terrain geometry expose the limitations of traditional robot designs, which are often forced…