Related papers: Learning to Slide Unknown Objects with Differentia…
Placing is a necessary skill for a personal robot to have in order to perform tasks such as arranging objects in a disorganized room. The object placements should not only be stable but also be in their semantically preferred placing areas…
Humans have a remarkable ability to predict the effect of physical interactions on the dynamics of objects. Endowing machines with this ability would allow important applications in areas like robotics and autonomous vehicles. In this work,…
The skill of pivoting an object with a robotic system is challenging for the external forces that act on the system, mainly given by contact interaction. The complexity increases when the same skills are required to generalize across…
Pushing objects through cluttered scenes is a challenging task, especially when the objects to be pushed have initially unknown dynamics and touching other entities has to be avoided to reduce the risk of damage. In this paper, we approach…
Grasping unknown objects has been an active research topic for decades. Approaches range from using various sensors (e.g. vision, tactile) to gain information about the object, to building passively compliant hands that react appropriately…
We present an approach to robotic manipulation of unknown objects through regulation of the object's contact configuration: the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the object, robot, and environment. A contact configuration…
Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…
The ability to place objects in the environment is an important skill for a personal robot. An object should not only be placed stably, but should also be placed in its preferred location/orientation. For instance, a plate is preferred to…
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…
We propose a method for improving the prediction accuracy of learned robot dynamics models on out-of-distribution (OOD) states. We achieve this by leveraging two key sources of structure often present in robot dynamics: 1) sparsity, i.e.,…
This paper is concerned with learning transferable forward models for push manipulation that can be applying to novel contexts and how to improve the quality of prediction when critical information is available. We propose to learn a…
This paper introduces a novel approach for the grasping and precise placement of various known rigid objects using multiple grippers within highly cluttered scenes. Using a single depth image of the scene, our method estimates multiple 6D…
By using directional distance sensors that have unknown locations, this paper proposes a method of estimating the shape of a location-unknown target object $T$ moving with unknown speed on an unknown straight line trajectory. Regardless of…
The capability to detect objects is a core part of autonomous driving. Due to sensor noise and incomplete data, perfectly detecting and localizing every object is infeasible. Therefore, it is important for a detector to provide the amount…
Object transport tasks are fundamental in robotic automation, emphasizing the importance of efficient and secure methods for moving objects. Non-prehensile transport can significantly improve transport efficiency, as it enables handling…
We propose a general self-supervised learning approach for spatial perception tasks, such as estimating the pose of an object relative to the robot, from onboard sensor readings. The model is learned from training episodes, by relying on: a…
We aim to teach robots to perform simple object manipulation tasks by watching a single video demonstration. Towards this goal, we propose an optimization approach that outputs a coarse and temporally evolving 3D scene to mimic the action…
Manipulating deformable objects remains a challenge within robotics due to the difficulties of state estimation, long-horizon planning, and predicting how the object will deform given an interaction. These challenges are the most pronounced…
In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding the physical properties of unseen objects through interactions between the objects and a robot. Handling unseen objects with special properties such as deformability is challenging for…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we…