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Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks,…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
We aim to develop an algorithm for robots to manipulate novel objects as tools for completing different task goals. An efficient and informative representation would facilitate the effectiveness and generalization of such algorithms. For…
In human-made scenarios, robots need to be able to fully operate objects in their surroundings, i.e., objects are required to be functionally grasped rather than only picked. This imposes very strict constraints on the object pose such that…
This work presents the computational design and validation of the Multi-Arm Relocatable Manipulator (MARM), a three-limb robot for space applications, with particular reference to the MIRROR (i.e., the Multi-arm Installation Robot for…
The last two decades have seen the emergence and steady development of tangible user interfaces. While most of these interfaces are applied for input - with output still on traditional computer screens - the goal of programmable matter and…
3D objects (artefacts) are made to fulfill functions. Designing an object often starts with defining a list of functionalities that it should provide, also known as functional requirements. Today, the design of 3D object models is still a…
Manipulating deformable objects in robotic cells is often costly and not widely accessible. However, the use of localized pneumatic gripping systems can enhance accessibility. Current methods that use pneumatic grippers to handle deformable…
Lego is a well-known platform for prototyping pixelized objects. However, robotic Lego prototyping (i.e., manipulating Lego bricks) is challenging due to the tight connections and accuracy requirements. This paper investigates safe and…
This work proposes a retrieve-and-transfer framework for zero-shot robotic manipulation, dubbed RAM, featuring generalizability across various objects, environments, and embodiments. Unlike existing approaches that learn manipulation from…
Loco-manipulation, physical interaction of various objects that is concurrently coordinated with locomotion, remains a major challenge for legged robots due to the need for both precise end-effector control and robustness to unmodeled…
We introduce Swarm Fabrication, a novel concept of creating on-demand, scalable, and reconfigurable fabrication machines made of swarm robots. We present ways to construct an element of fabrication machines, such as motors, elevator, table,…
Robotics and automation have the potential to significantly improve quality of life for people with assistive needs and their carers. Adoption of such technologies at this point in time is far from widespread. This paper presents a novel…
This paper presents a combined task and motion planner for a robot arm to carry out 3D metal wire curving tasks by collaborating with a bending machine. We assume a collaborative robot that is safe to work in a human environment but has a…
Recent advances in augmented reality (AR) have enabled interactive systems that assist users in physical assembly tasks. In this paper, we present an AR-assisted assembly workflow that leverages object recognition and hand tracking to (1)…
Robotic deformable-object manipulation is a challenge in the robotic industry because deformable objects have complicated and various object states. Predicting those object states and updating manipulation planning is time-consuming and…
It is desirable to enable robots capable of automatic assembly. Structural understanding of object parts plays a crucial role in this task yet remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the setting of furniture assembly from…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling approaches…
Handling object deformations for robotic grasping is still a major problem to solve. In this paper, we propose an efficient learning-free solution for this problem where generated grasp hypotheses of a region of an object are adapted to its…