Related papers: Real Robot Challenge: A Robotics Competition in th…
The ability of robotic grippers to not only grasp but also re-position and re-orient objects in-hand is crucial for achieving versatile, general-purpose manipulation. While recent advances in soft robotic grasping has greatly improved grasp…
Accessibility is one of the most important features in the design of robots and their interfaces. This thesis proposes methods that improve the accessibility of robots for three different target audiences: consumers, researchers, and…
Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare…
Circumnavigation control is useful in real-world applications such as entrapping a hostile target. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous multi-robot system where robots have different physical properties, such as maximum movement…
The problem of grasping objects using a multi-finger hand has received significant attention in recent years. However, it remains challenging to handle a large number of unfamiliar objects in real and cluttered environments. In this work,…
Robot picking and packing tasks require dexterous manipulation skills, such as rearranging objects to establish a good grasping pose, or placing and pushing items to achieve tight packing. These tasks are challenging for robots due to the…
Dexterity is often seen as a cornerstone of complex manipulation. Humans are able to perform a host of skills with their hands, from making food to operating tools. In this paper, we investigate these challenges, especially in the case of…
A fundamental challenge in teaching robots is to provide an effective interface for human teachers to demonstrate useful skills to a robot. This challenge is exacerbated in dexterous manipulation, where teaching high-dimensional,…
Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in…
Cloud robotics has emerged as a promising technology for robotics applications due to its advantages of offloading computationally intensive tasks, facilitating data sharing, and enhancing robot coordination. However, integrating cloud…
This paper focuses on the scalable robot learning for manipulation in the dexterous robot arm-hand systems, where the remote human-robot interactions via augmented reality (AR) are established to collect the expert demonstration data for…
Human-like dexterous hands with multiple fingers offer human-level manipulation capabilities, but training control policies that can directly deploy on real hardware remains difficult due to contact-rich physics and imperfect actuation. We…
The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual…
Scientific competitions are crucial in the field of service robotics. They foster knowledge exchange and allow teams to test their research in unstandardized scenarios and compare result. Such is the case of RoboCup@Home. However, keeping…
In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
Robot manipulation is an important part of human-robot interaction technology. However, traditional pre-programmed methods can only accomplish simple and repetitive tasks. To enable effective communication between robots and humans, and to…
Hand-object motion-capture (MoCap) repositories offer large-scale, contact-rich demonstrations and hold promise for scaling dexterous robotic manipulation. Yet demonstration inaccuracies and embodiment gaps between human and robot hands…
Dextrous in-hand manipulation with a multi-fingered robotic hand is a challenging task, esp. when performed with the hand oriented upside down, demanding permanent force-closure, and when no external sensors are used. For the task of…
We present CloudGripper, an open source cloud robotics testbed, consisting of a scalable, space and cost-efficient design constructed as a rack of 32 small robot arm work cells. Each robot work cell is fully enclosed and features individual…