Related papers: Exploratory Grasping: Asymptotically Optimal Algor…

Task-oriented grasping of unfamiliar objects is a necessary skill for robots in dynamic in-home environments. Inspired by the human capability to grasp such objects through intuition about their shape and structure, we present a novel…

Robotic grasping of arbitrary objects even in completely known environments still remains a challenging problem. Most previously developed algorithms had focused on fingertip grasp, failing to solve the problem even for fully actuated…

Effective solving of constraint problems often requires choosing good or specific search heuristics. However, choosing or designing a good search heuristic is non-trivial and is often a manual process. In this paper, rather than manually…

In the search and retrieval of multimedia objects, it is impractical to either manually or automatically extract the contents for indexing since most of the multimedia contents are not machine extractable, while manual extraction tends to…

In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…

A dexterous hand capable of grasping any object is essential for the development of general-purpose embodied intelligent robots. However, due to the high degree of freedom in dexterous hands and the vast diversity of objects, generating…

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Exploration is a critical challenge in robotics, centered on understanding unknown environments. In this work, we focus on robots exploring structured indoor environments which are often predictable and composed of repeating patterns. Most…

Many objects, such as tools and household items, can be used only if grasped in a very specific way - grasped functionally. Often, a direct functional grasp is not possible, though. We propose a method for learning a dexterous pre-grasp…

Combinatorial bandits with semi-bandit feedback generalize multi-armed bandits, where the agent chooses sets of arms and observes a noisy reward for each arm contained in the chosen set. The action set satisfies a given structure such as…

Grasping objects is one of the most important abilities that a robot needs to master in order to interact with its environment. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on deep neural networks trained to jointly predict a graspability score…

Grasping inhomogeneous objects in real-world applications remains a challenging task due to the unknown physical properties such as mass distribution and coefficient of friction. In this study, we propose a meta-learning algorithm called…

Grasping a novel target object in constrained environments (e.g., walls, bins, and shelves) requires intensive reasoning about grasp pose reachability to avoid collisions with the surrounding structures. Typical 6-DoF robotic grasping…

Several sparsity-constrained algorithms such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit or the Frank-Wolfe algorithm with sparsity constraints work by iteratively selecting a novel atom to add to the current non-zero set of variables. This selection…

One of the first tasks we learn as children is to grasp objects based on our tactile perception. Incorporating such skill in robots will enable multiple applications, such as increasing flexibility in industrial processes or providing…

Efficient and robust grasp pose detection is vital for robotic manipulation. For general 6 DoF grasping, conventional methods treat all points in a scene equally and usually adopt uniform sampling to select grasp candidates. However, we…

Nowadays, a number of grasping algorithms have been proposed, that can predict a candidate of grasp poses, even for unseen objects. This enables a robotic manipulator to pick-and-place such objects. However, some of the predicted grasp…

Robotics research has made significant strides in learning, yet mastering basic skills like object placement remains a fundamental challenge. A key bottleneck is the acquisition of large-scale, high-quality data, which is often a manual and…

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

In query learning, the goal is to identify an unknown object while minimizing the number of "yes" or "no" questions (queries) posed about that object. A well-studied algorithm for query learning is known as generalized binary search (GBS).…