Related papers: SwingBot: Learning Physical Features from In-hand …
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Manipulation is a key capability in domestic service robots, as can be seen in the rulebooks of last Robocup@Home editions. Currently, object recognition is performed based mostly on visual information. Some robots use also 3D information…
When manipulating objects, humans finely adapt their motions to the characteristics of what they are handling. Thus, an attentive observer can foresee hidden properties of the manipulated object, such as its weight, temperature, and even…
Robotic grasping in cluttered environments is often infeasible due to obstacles preventing possible grasps. Then, pre-grasping manipulation like shifting or pushing an object becomes necessary. We developed an algorithm that can learn, in…
Research on tactile sensing has been progressing at constant pace. In robotics, tactile sensing is typically studied in the context of object grasping and manipulation. In this domain, the development of robust, multi-modal, tactile sensors…
In essence, successful grasp boils down to correct responses to multiple contact events between fingertips and objects. In most scenarios, tactile sensing is adequate to distinguish contact events. Due to the nature of high dimensionality…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…
We propose DINOBot, a novel imitation learning framework for robot manipulation, which leverages the image-level and pixel-level capabilities of features extracted from Vision Transformers trained with DINO. When interacting with a novel…
Tactile sensors provide information that can be used to learn and execute manipulation tasks. Different tasks, however, might require different levels of sensory information; which in turn likely affect learning rates and performance. This…
Picking up transparent objects is still a challenging task for robots. The visual properties of transparent objects such as reflection and refraction make the current grasping methods that rely on camera sensing fail to detect and localise…
Haptic exploration is a key skill for both robots and humans to discriminate and handle unknown objects or to recognize familiar objects. Its active nature is evident in humans who from early on reliably acquire sophisticated sensory-motor…
Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…
Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
In this work, we delve into the intricate synergy among non-prehensile actions like pushing, and prehensile actions such as grasping and throwing, within the domain of robotic manipulation. We introduce an innovative approach to learning…
Grasping objects of different shapes and sizes - a foundational, effortless skill for humans - remains a challenging task in robotics. Although model-based approaches can predict stable grasp configurations for known object models, they…
Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…
Robotics research has long sought to give robots the ability to perceive the physical world through touch in an analogous manner to many biological systems. Developing such tactile capabilities is important for numerous emerging…
Knowledge of the 6D pose of an object can benefit in-hand object manipulation. In-hand 6D object pose estimation is challenging because of heavy occlusion produced by the robot's grippers, which can have an adverse effect on methods that…
Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not…