Related papers: Romeo: A Design Tool for Embedding Transformable P…

For a robot to personalize physical assistance effectively, it must learn user preferences that can be generally reapplied to future scenarios. In this work, we investigate personalization of household cleanup with robots that can tidy up…

Flexible object manipulation of paper and cloth is a major research challenge in robot manipulation. Although there have been efforts to develop hardware that enables specific actions and to realize a single action of paper folding using…

Modular reconfigurable robots require reliable mechanisms for automated module exchange, but conventional rigid active couplings often fail due to inevitable positioning and orientational errors. To address this, we propose a…

Assistive robot arms have the potential to help disabled or elderly adults eat everyday meals without relying on a caregiver. To provide meaningful assistance, these robots must reach for food items, pick them up, and then carry them to the…

When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…

Robots assisting us in factories or homes must learn to make use of objects as tools to perform tasks, e.g., a tray for carrying objects. We consider the problem of learning commonsense knowledge of when a tool may be useful and how its use…

Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface…

It is challenging for humans -- particularly those living with physical disabilities -- to control high-dimensional, dexterous robots. Prior work explores learning embedding functions that map a human's low-dimensional inputs (e.g., via a…

Regrasping on fixtures is a promising approach to reduce pose uncertainty in robotic assembly, but conventional rigid fixtures lack adaptability and require dedicated designs for each part. To overcome this limitation, we propose a soft jig…

Articulated objects like doors, drawers, valves, and tools are pervasive in our everyday unstructured dynamic environments. Articulation models describe the joint nature between the different parts of an articulated object. As most of these…

We propose Pomo3D, a 3D portrait manipulation framework that allows free accessorizing by decomposing and recomposing portraits and accessories. It enables the avatars to attain out-of-distribution (OOD) appearances of simultaneously…

We introduce VR-Doh, an open-source, hands-on 3D modeling system that enables intuitive creation and manipulation of elastoplastic objects in Virtual Reality (VR). By customizing the Material Point Method (MPM) for real-time simulation of…

This paper addresses two intertwined needs for collaborative robots operating in shop-floor environments. The first is the ability to perform complex manipulation operations, such as those on articulated or even flexible objects, in a way…

Task-oriented object grasping and rearrangement are critical skills for robots to accomplish different real-world manipulation tasks. However, they remain challenging due to partial observations of the objects and shape variations in…

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) for robots has a wide range of applications in various fields such as industrial, service and health care sectors. However, compared to manipulation of rigid objects, DOM poses significant challenges for…

We propose a framework enabling mobile manipulators to reliably complete pick-and-place tasks for assembling structures from construction blocks. The picking uses an eye-in-hand visual servoing controller for object tracking with Control…

Existing shape estimation methods for deformable object manipulation suffer from the drawbacks of being off-line, model dependent, noise-sensitive or occlusion-sensitive, and thus are not appropriate for manipulation tasks requiring high…

This paper presents a sim-to-real approach that enables legged robots to dynamically manipulate large and heavy objects with whole-body dexterity. Our key insight is that by performing test-time steering of a pre-trained whole-body control…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

This study starts from the counter-intuitive question of how we can render a conventional stiff, non-stretchable and even brittle material conformable so that it can fully wrap around a curved surface, such as a sphere, without failure.…