Related papers: Playing with Food: Learning Food Item Representati…
When a robot encounters a novel object, how should it respond$\unicode{x2014}$what data should it collect$\unicode{x2014}$so that it can find the object in the future? In this work, we present a method for learning image features of an…
To be useful in everyday environments, robots must be able to observe and learn about objects. Recent datasets enable progress for classifying data into known object categories; however, it is unclear how to collect reliable object data…
Service robots are expected to autonomously and efficiently work in human-centric environments. For this type of robots, object perception and manipulation are challenging tasks due to need for accurate and real-time response. This paper…
Precise robotic grasping of several novel objects is a huge challenge in manufacturing, automation, and logistics. Most of the current methods for model-free grasping are disadvantaged by the sparse data in grasping datasets and by errors…
Learning various motor skills for quadrupedal robots is a challenging problem that requires careful design of task-specific mathematical models or reward descriptions. In this work, we propose to learn a single capable policy using deep…
Service robots are integrating more and more into our daily lives to help us with various tasks. In such environments, robots frequently face new objects while working in the environment and need to learn them in an open-ended fashion.…
Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one…
Robotic manipulation has made significant advancements, with systems demonstrating high precision and repeatability. However, this remarkable precision often fails to translate into efficient manipulation of thin deformable objects. Current…
Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and generalize…
To study how mental object representations are related to behavior, we estimated sparse, non-negative representations of objects using human behavioral judgments on images representative of 1,854 object categories. These representations…
Assistance during eating is essential for those with severe mobility issues or eating risks. However, dependence on traditional human caregivers is linked to malnutrition, weight loss, and low self-esteem. For those who require eating…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. It is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines these modalities which have very different characteristics.…
Instance segmentation of unknown objects from images is regarded as relevant for several robot skills including grasping, tracking and object sorting. Recent results in computer vision have shown that large hand-labeled datasets enable high…
Robot grasping is often formulated as a learning problem. With the increasing speed and quality of physics simulations, generating large-scale grasping data sets that feed learning algorithms is becoming more and more popular. An often…
Food texture is a complex property; various sensory attributes such as perceived crispiness and wetness have been identified as ways to quantify it. Objective and automatic recognition of these attributes has applications in multiple…
Food recognition is an important task for a variety of applications, including managing health conditions and assisting visually impaired people. Several food recognition studies have focused on generic types of food or specific cuisines,…
Advancing robotic manipulation of deformable objects can enable automation of repetitive tasks across multiple industries, from food processing to textiles and healthcare. Yet robots struggle with the high dimensionality of deformable…
Modeling and manipulating elasto-plastic objects are essential capabilities for robots to perform complex industrial and household interaction tasks (e.g., stuffing dumplings, rolling sushi, and making pottery). However, due to the high…
Inertial parameters characterise an object's motion under applied forces, and can provide strong priors for planning and control of robotic actions to manipulate the object. However, these parameters are not available a-priori in situations…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important…