Related papers: Manipulation Planning Among Movable Obstacles Usin…
A particular type of assistive robots designed for physical interaction with objects could play an important role assisting with mobility and fall prevention in healthcare facilities. Autonomous mobile manipulation presents a hurdle prior…
In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…
This paper presents a method for constrained motion planning from vision, which enables a robot to move its end-effector over an observed surface, given start and destination points. The robot has no prior knowledge of the surface shape,…
In warehouse and manufacturing environments, manipulation platforms are frequently deployed at conveyor belts to perform pick and place tasks. Because objects on the conveyor belts are moving, robots have limited time to pick them up. This…
This paper considers the problem of rearrangement planning, i.e finding a sequence of manipulation actions that displace multiple objects from an initial configuration to a given goal configuration. Rearrangement is a critical skill for…
In complex scenarios where typical pick-and-place techniques are insufficient, often non-prehensile manipulation can ensure that a robot is able to fulfill its task. However, non-prehensile manipulation is challenging due to its…
This paper uses a mobile manipulator with a collaborative robotic arm to manipulate objects beyond the robot's maximum payload. It proposes a single-shot probabilistic roadmap-based method to plan and optimize manipulation motion with…
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
Many methods have been developed for planning the motion of robotic arms for picking and placing, ranging from local optimization to global search techniques, which are effective for sparsely placed objects. Dense clutter, however, still…
This paper presents a planning algorithm designed to improve cooperative robot behavior concerning human comfort during forceful human-robot physical interaction. Particularly, we are interested in planning for object grasping and…
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
Articulated and flexible objects constitute a challenge for robot manipulation tasks but are present in different real-world settings, including home and industrial environments. Current approaches to the manipulation of articulated and…
Physical reasoning is a core aspect of intelligence in animals and humans. A central question is what model should be used as a basis for reasoning. Existing work considered models ranging from intuitive physics and physical simulators to…
Daily tasks require us to use our whole body to manipulate objects, for instance when our hands are unavailable. We consider the issue of providing humanoid robots with the ability to autonomously perform similar whole-body manipulation…
Non-prehensile manipulation methods usually use a simple end effector, e.g., a single rod, to manipulate the object. Compared to the grasping method, such an end effector is compact and flexible, and hence it can perform tasks in a…
For robots to be able to manipulate in unknown and unstructured environments the robot should be capable of operating under partial observability of the environment. Object occlusions and unmodeled environments are some of the factors that…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…
We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…