Related papers: Learning Transferable Push Manipulation Skills in …

In order to be effective general purpose machines in real world environments, robots not only will need to adapt their existing manipulation skills to new circumstances, they will need to acquire entirely new skills on-the-fly. A great…

Object handover is a common form of interaction that is widely present in collaborative tasks. However, achieving it efficiently remains a challenge. We address the problem of ensuring resilient robotic actions that can adapt to complex…

We explore the problem of estimating the mass distribution of an articulated object by an interactive robotic agent. Our method predicts the mass distribution of an object by using the limited sensing and actuating capabilities of a robotic…

For many robotic manipulation and contact tasks, it is crucial to accurately estimate uncertain object poses, for which certain geometry and sensor information are fused in some optimal fashion. Previous results for this problem primarily…

This paper presents a novel manipulation strategy that uses keypoint correspondences extracted from visuo-tactile sensor images to facilitate precise object manipulation. Our approach uses the visuo-tactile feedback to guide the robot's…

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…

Implicit communication plays such a crucial role during social exchanges that it must be considered for a good experience in human-robot interaction. This work addresses implicit communication associated with the detection of physical…

A long-standing challenge in Reinforcement Learning is enabling agents to learn a model of their environment which can be transferred to solve other problems in a world with the same underlying rules. One reason this is difficult is the…

Humans perform exquisite sensorimotor skills, both individually and in teams, from athletes performing rhythmic gymnastics to everyday tasks like carrying a cup of coffee. The "predictive brain" framework suggests that mastering these…

Pushing is a useful robotic capability for positioning and reorienting objects. The ability to accurately predict the effect of pushes can enable efficient trajectory planning and complicated object manipulation. Physical prediction models…

For successful deployment of robots in multifaceted situations, an understanding of the robot for its environment is indispensable. With advancing performance of state-of-the-art object detectors, the capability of robots to detect objects…

The ability to plan and execute goal specific actions in varied, unexpected settings is a central requirement of intelligent agents. In this paper, we explore how an agent can be equipped with an internal model of the dynamics of the…

Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…

In-hand object manipulation is an important capability for dexterous manipulation. In this paper, we introduce a modeling and planning framework for in-hand object reconfiguration, focusing on frictional patch contacts between the robot's…

Human-robot object handover is a crucial element for assistive robots that aim to help people in their daily lives, including elderly care, hospitals, and factory floors. The existing approaches to solving these tasks rely on pre-selected…

Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…

While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…

Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…

In-hand object reorientation has been a challenging problem in robotics due to high dimensional actuation space and the frequent change in contact state between the fingers and the objects. We present a simple model-free framework that can…

Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…