Related papers: Active Multi-Object Exploration and Recognition vi…

Perceiving the environment through touch is important for robots to reach in cluttered environments, but devising a way to sense without disturbing objects is challenging. This work presents the design and modelling of whisker-inspired…

Inspired by the human ability to perform complex manipulation in the complete absence of vision (like retrieving an object from a pocket), the robotic manipulation field is motivated to develop new methods for tactile-based object…

Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…

Tactile sensing and the manipulation of delicate objects are critical challenges in robotics. This study presents a vision-based magnetic-actuated whisker array sensor that integrates these functions. The sensor features eight whiskers…

This paper investigates the task-driven exploration of unknown environments with mobile sensors communicating compressed measurements. The sensors explore the area and transmit their compressed data to another robot, assisting it to reach…

This project proposes a bioinspired multi-robot system using Distributed Optimization for efficient exploration and mapping of unknown environments. Each robot explores its environment and creates a map, which is afterwards put together to…

In this paper, we present a method to manipulate unknown objects in-hand using tactile sensing without relying on a known object model. In many cases, vision-only approaches may not be feasible; for example, due to occlusion in cluttered…

Here we propose and investigate a novel vibrissal tactile sensor - the TacWhisker array - based on modifying a 3D-printed optical cutaneous (fingertip) tactile sensor - the TacTip. Two versions are considered: a static TacWhisker array…

Perception using whisker-inspired tactile sensors currently faces a major challenge: the lack of active control in robots based on direct contact information from the whisker. To accurately reconstruct object contours, it is crucial for the…

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to…

Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…

Existing object-search approaches enable robots to search through free pathways, however, robots operating in unstructured human-centered environments frequently also have to manipulate the environment to their needs. In this work, we…

Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with poor-lighting, smoke, dust or reflective obstacles. Inspired…

Whisker-like touch sensors offer unique advantages for short-range perception in environments where visual and long-range sensing are unreliable, such as confined, cluttered, or low-visibility settings. This paper presents a framework for…

Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…

Mobile robots exploring indoor environments increasingly rely on vision-language models to perceive high-level semantic cues in camera images, such as object categories. Such models offer the potential to substantially advance robot…

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…

In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the…

General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…

This work presents an innovative solution for robotic odometry, path planning and exploration in wild unknown environments, focusing on digital modelling. The approach uses a minimum cost formulation with pseudo-randomly generated…