Related papers: Shape Control of Elastic Objects Based on Implicit…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
Well structured visual representations can make robot learning faster and can improve generalization. In this paper, we study how we can acquire effective object-centric representations for robotic manipulation tasks without human labeling…
The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…
3D facial animation is often produced by manipulating facial deformation models (or rigs), that are traditionally parameterized by expression controls. A key component that is usually overlooked is expression 'style', as in, how a…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
We present a method for system identification of flexible objects by measuring forces and displacement during interaction with a manipulating arm. We model the object's structure and flexibility by a chain of rigid bodies connected by…
The last several years have seen significant progress in using depth cameras for tracking articulated objects such as human bodies, hands, and robotic manipulators. Most approaches focus on tracking skeletal parameters of a fixed shape…
Differentiable simulation has become a powerful tool for system identification. While prior work has focused on identifying robot properties using robot-specific data or object properties using object-specific data, our approach calibrates…
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…
We introduce a novel data-driven approach aimed at designing high-quality shape deformations based on a coarse localized input signal. Unlike previous data-driven methods that require a global shape encoding, we observe that…
Mirroring the complex structures and diverse functions of natural organisms is a long-standing challenge in robotics. Modern fabrication techniques have greatly expanded the feasible hardware, but using these systems requires control…
When developing control laws for robotic systems, the principle factor when examining their performance is choosing inputs that allow smooth tracking to a reference input. In the context of robotic manipulation, this involves translating an…
The paper addresses the following problem: given a set of man-made shapes, e.g., chairs, can we quickly rank and explore the set of shapes with respect to a given avatar pose? Answering this question requires identifying which shapes are…
Body posture influences human and robots performance in manipulation tasks, as appropriate poses facilitate motion or force exertion along different axes. In robotics, manipulability ellipsoids arise as a powerful descriptor to analyze,…
In this paper we present a visual servoing approach to the problem of object grasping and more generally, to the problem of aligning an end-effector with an object. First we extend the method proposed by Espiau et al. [1] to the case of a…
Deformable objects often appear in unstructured configurations. Tracing deformable objects helps bringing them into extended states and facilitating the downstream manipulation tasks. Due to the requirements for object-specific modeling or…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
As robots increasingly become part of shared human spaces, their movements must transcend basic functionality by incorporating expressive qualities to enhance engagement and communication. This paper introduces a movement-centered design…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an…