Related papers: Active Extrinsic Contact Sensing: Application to G…
When manipulating an object to accomplish complex tasks, humans rely on both vision and touch to keep track of the object's 6D pose. However, most existing object pose tracking systems in robotics rely exclusively on visual signals, which…
Even though the peg-hole insertion is one of the well-studied problems in robotics, it still remains a challenge for robots, especially when it comes to flexibility and the ability to generalize. Successful completion of the task requires…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
One of the main challenges in peg-in-a-hole (PiH) insertion tasks is in handling the uncertainty in the location of the target hole. In order to address it, high-dimensional sensor inputs from sensor modalities such as vision, force/torque…
Accurately modeling contact behaviors for real-world, near-rigid materials remains a grand challenge for existing rigid-body physics simulators. This paper introduces a data-augmented contact model that incorporates analytical solutions…
Active recognition enables robots to intelligently explore novel observations, thereby acquiring more information while circumventing undesired viewing conditions. Recent approaches favor learning policies from simulated or collected data,…
Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
Estimating the location of contact is a primary function of artificial tactile sensing apparatuses that perceive the environment through touch. Existing contact localization methods use flat geometry and uniform sensor distributions as a…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
Simulation has recently become key for deep reinforcement learning to safely and efficiently acquire general and complex control policies from visual and proprioceptive inputs. Tactile information is not usually considered despite its…
Contact-rich manipulation plays an important role in daily human activities. However, uncertain physical parameters often pose significant challenges for both planning and control. A promising strategy is to develop policies that are robust…
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…
We present a novel approach for mobile manipulator self-calibration using contact information. Our method, based on point cloud registration, is applied to estimate the extrinsic transform between a fixed vision sensor mounted on a mobile…
While classic control theory offers state of the art solutions in many problem scenarios, it is often desired to improve beyond the structure of such solutions and surpass their limitations. To this end, residual policy learning (RPL)…
Reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great success in solving different problems ranging from playing video games to robotics. However, they struggle to solve delicate robotic problems, especially those involving contact…
Traditional methods to achieve high localization accuracy with tactile sensors usually use a matrix of miniaturized individual sensors distributed on the area of interest. This approach usually comes at a price of increased complexity in…
Compared to rigid hands, underactuated compliant hands offer greater adaptability to object shapes, provide stable grasps, and are often more cost-effective. However, they introduce uncertainties in hand-object interactions due to their…