Related papers: ContactNets: Learning Discontinuous Contact Dynami…
Object-centric representation is an essential abstraction for forward prediction. Most existing forward models learn this representation through extensive supervision (e.g., object class and bounding box) although such ground-truth…
Learning predictive models from interaction with the world allows an agent, such as a robot, to learn about how the world works, and then use this learned model to plan coordinated sequences of actions to bring about desired outcomes.…
There is an increased demand for task automation in robots. Contact-rich tasks, wherein multiple contact transitions occur in a series of operations, are extensively being studied to realize high accuracy. In this study, we propose a…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
This paper presents a contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) framework for the real-time discovery of multi-contact motions, without predefined contact mode sequences or foothold positions. This approach utilizes the…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…
To reach human performance on complex tasks, a key ability for artificial systems is to understand physical interactions between objects, and predict future outcomes of a situation. This ability, often referred to as intuitive physics, has…
Safe deployment of autonomous robots in diverse scenarios requires agents that are capable of efficiently adapting to new environments while satisfying constraints. In this work, we propose a practical and theoretically-justified approach…
Estimating the internal state of a robotic system is complex: this is performed from multiple heterogeneous sensor inputs and knowledge sources. Discretization of such inputs is done to capture saliences, represented as symbolic…
There is a growing need for social robots and intelligent agents that can effectively interact with and support users. For the interactions to be seamless, the agents need to analyse social scenes and behavioural cues from their (robot's)…
We present a principled method for dynamic simulation of rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact is assumed to be a non-convex contact patch that can be modeled as a union of convex patches. The prevalent…
A general framework for performing event-driven simulations of systems with semi-flexible or rigid bodies interacting under impulsive torques and forces is outlined. Two different approaches are presented. In the first, the dynamics and…
Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…
Reconstructing 3D human-object interaction (HOI) from single-view RGB images is challenging due to the absence of depth information and potential occlusions. Existing methods simply predict the body poses merely rely on network training on…
Learning disentangled representations is a key step towards effectively discovering and modelling the underlying structure of environments. In the natural sciences, physics has found great success by describing the universe in terms of…
Simulating rigid collisions among arbitrary shapes is notoriously difficult due to complex geometry and the strong non-linearity of the interactions. While graph neural network (GNN)-based models are effective at learning to simulate…
Close and continuous interaction with rich contacts is a crucial aspect of human activities (e.g. hugging, dancing) and of interest in many domains like activity recognition, motion prediction, character animation, etc. However, acquiring…
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…
Detecting and localizing contacts is essential for robot manipulators to perform contact-rich tasks in unstructured environments. While robot skins can localize contacts on the surface of robot arms, these sensors are not yet robust or…