Related papers: A 2D Surgical Simulation Framework for Tool-Tissue…
Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and…
Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs) are aggregations of soft blocks whose design is amenable to optimization. We here present a software, 2D-VSR-Sim, for facilitating research concerning the optimization of VSRs body and brain. The software,…
This paper presents a correspondence-free, function-based sim-to-real learning method for controlling deformable freeform surfaces. Unlike traditional sim-to-real transfer methods that strongly rely on marker points with full…
Surgeons normally need surgical scissors and tissue grippers to cut through a deformable surgical tissue. The cutting accuracy depends on the skills to manipulate these two tools. Such skills are part of basic surgical skills training as in…
Indirect simultaneous positioning (ISP), where internal tissue points are placed at desired locations indirectly through the manipulation of boundary points, is a type of subtask frequently performed in robotic surgeries. Although…
Wearable assistive devices are increasingly becoming softer. Modelling their interface with human tissue is necessary to capture transmission of dynamic assistance. However, their nonlinear and compliant nature makes both physical modeling…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…
Robotic manipulation is essential for modernizing factories and automating industrial tasks like polishing, which require advanced tactile abilities. These robots must be easily set up, safely work with humans, learn tasks autonomously, and…
Simulation is a central tool for scalable robot learning, but its effectiveness depends on the quality of object assets. While modern 3D datasets provide rich geometric and kinematic representations, they typically lack the physical…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
Skin dynamics contributes to the enriched realism of human body models in rendered scenes. Traditional methods rely on physics-based simulations to accurately reproduce the dynamic behavior of soft tissues. Due to the model complexity and…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Simulation frameworks such as Isaac Sim have enabled scalable robot learning for locomotion and rigid-body manipulation; however, contact-rich simulation remains a major bottleneck for deformable object manipulation. The continuously…
We present a method for differentiable simulation of soft articulated bodies. Our work enables the integration of differentiable physical dynamics into gradient-based pipelines. We develop a top-down matrix assembly algorithm within…
Intraoperative ultrasound imaging is used to facilitate safe brain tumour resection. However, due to challenges with image interpretation and the physical scanning, this tool has yet to achieve widespread adoption in neurosurgery. In this…
Palpation, the use of touch in medical examination, is almost exclusively performed by humans. We investigate a proof of concept for an artificial palpation method based on self-supervised learning. Our key idea is that an encoder-decoder…
Simulators are an important tool in robotics that is used to develop robot software and generate synthetic data for machine learning algorithms. Faster simulation can result in better software validation and larger amounts of data. Previous…
Soft tissue simulation in virtual environments is becoming increasingly important for medical applications. However, the high deformability of soft tissue poses significant challenges. Existing methods rely on segmentation, meshing and…
We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…