Related papers: Vision-driven Compliant Manipulation for Reliable,…
Shared control improves Human-Robot Interaction by reducing the user's workload and increasing the robot's autonomy. It allows robots to perform tasks under the user's supervision. Current eye-tracking-driven approaches face several…
Contact can be conceptualized as a set of constraints imposed on two bodies that are interacting with one another in some way. The nature of a contact, whether a point, line, or surface, dictates how these bodies are able to move with…
We present a self-contained, soft robotic hand composed of soft pneumatic actuator modules that are equipped with strain and pressure sensing. We show how this data can be used to discern whether a grasp was successful. Co-locating sensing…
Tracking the pose of an object while it is being held and manipulated by a robot hand is difficult for vision-based methods due to significant occlusions. Prior works have explored using contact feedback and particle filters to localize…
Robotic manipulation of deformable 1D objects such as ropes, cables, and hoses is challenging due to the lack of high-fidelity analytic models and large configuration spaces. Furthermore, learning end-to-end manipulation policies directly…
The robotic manipulation of composite rigid-deformable objects (i.e. those with mixed non-homogeneous stiffness properties) is a challenging problem with clear practical applications that, despite the recent progress in the field, it has…
Continuum manipulators in flexible endoscopic surgical systems offer high dexterity for minimally invasive procedures; however, accurate pose estimation and closed-loop control remain challenging due to hysteresis, compliance, and limited…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…
We propose a robotic manipulation system that can pivot objects on a surface using vision, wrist force and tactile sensing. We aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper by allowing rotational slip,…
Many high precision (dis)assembly tasks are still being performed by humans, whereas this is an ideal opportunity for automation. This paper provides a framework which enables a non-expert human operator to teach a robotic arm to do complex…
This paper presents two visual trackers from the different paradigms of learning and registration based tracking and evaluates their application in image based visual servoing. They can track object motion with four degrees of freedom (DoF)…
The inherent difficulty and limited scalability of collecting manipulation data using multi-fingered robot hand hardware platforms have resulted in severe data scarcity, impeding research on data-driven dexterous manipulation policy…
Manipulation and insertion of small and tight-toleranced objects in robotic assembly remain a critical challenge for vision-based robotics systems due to the required precision and cluttered environment. Conventional global or wrist-mounted…
Robotic automation has transformed scientific workflows in domains such as chemistry and materials science, yet free-space optics, which is a high precision domain, remains largely manual. Optical systems impose strict spatial and angular…
In this paper, we study the problem of adapting manipulation trajectories involving grasped objects (e.g. tools) defined for a single grasp pose to novel grasp poses. A common approach to address this is to define a new trajectory for each…
Mechanical compliance is a key design parameter for dynamic contact-rich manipulation, affecting task success and safety robustness over contact geometry variation. Design of soft robotic structures, such as compliant fingers, requires…
Assembling a slave object into a fixture-free master object represents a critical challenge in flexible manufacturing. Existing deep reinforcement learning-based methods, while benefiting from visual or operational priors, often struggle…
A vision system attached to a manipulator excels at tracing a moving target object while effectively handling obstacles, overcoming limitations arising from the camera's confined field of view and occluded line of sight. Meanwhile, the…
Today robots must be safe, versatile, and user-friendly to operate in unstructured and human-populated environments. Dynamical system-based imitation learning enables robots to perform complex tasks stably and without explicit programming,…
A robot's ability to act is fundamentally constrained by what it can perceive. Many existing approaches to visual representation learning utilize general-purpose training criteria, e.g. image reconstruction, smoothness in latent space, or…