Related papers: Learning Transferable Push Manipulation Skills in …
We investigate an experiential learning paradigm for acquiring an internal model of intuitive physics. Our model is evaluated on a real-world robotic manipulation task that requires displacing objects to target locations by poking. The…
Robot-to-human object handover is an important step in many human robot collaboration tasks. A successful handover requires the robot to maintain a stable grasp on the object while making sure the human receives the object in a natural and…
A core challenge for an agent learning to interact with the world is to predict how its actions affect objects in its environment. Many existing methods for learning the dynamics of physical interactions require labeled object information.…
In essence, successful grasp boils down to correct responses to multiple contact events between fingertips and objects. In most scenarios, tactile sensing is adequate to distinguish contact events. Due to the nature of high dimensionality…
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.…
Does having visual priors (e.g. the ability to detect objects) facilitate learning to perform vision-based manipulation (e.g. picking up objects)? We study this problem under the framework of transfer learning, where the model is first…
This paper presents a novel learning-based approach to dynamic robot-to-human handover, addressing the challenges of delivering objects to a moving receiver. We hypothesize that dynamic handover, where the robot adjusts to the receiver's…
Acquiring new robot motor skills is cumbersome, as learning a skill from scratch and without prior knowledge requires the exploration of a large space of motor configurations. Accordingly, for learning a new task, time could be saved by…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
Dynamic manipulation, such as robot tossing or throwing objects, has recently gained attention as a novel paradigm to speed up logistic operations. However, the focus has predominantly been on the object's landing location, irrespective of…
We present a new approach to transfer grasp configurations from prior example objects to novel objects. We assume the novel and example objects have the same topology and similar shapes. We perform 3D segmentation on these objects using…
Future service robots working in human environments, such as kitchens, will face situations where they need to improvise. The usual tool for a given task might not be available and the robot will have to use some substitute tool. The robot…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
When a robot executes a task, it is necessary to model the relationship among its body, target objects, tools, and environment, and to control its body to realize the target state. However, it is difficult to model them using classical…
It is doubtful that animals have perfect inverse models of their limbs (e.g., what muscle contraction must be applied to every joint to reach a particular location in space). However, in robot control, moving an arm's end-effector to a…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping…
We propose a new technique for pushing an unknown object from an initial configuration to a goal configuration with stability constraints. The proposed method leverages recent progress in differentiable physics models to learn unknown…
Safe human-to-robot handovers of unknown objects require accurate estimation of hand poses and object properties, such as shape, trajectory, and weight. Accurately estimating these properties requires the use of scanned 3D object models or…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…