Related papers: Contact-Rich Manipulation of a Flexible Object bas…
Humans make extensive use of vision and touch as complementary senses, with vision providing global information about the scene and touch measuring local information during manipulation without suffering from occlusions. While prior work…
This paper tackles the task of singulating and grasping paper-like deformable objects. We refer to such tasks as paper-flipping. In contrast to manipulating deformable objects that lack compression strength (such as shirts and ropes), minor…
Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…
Fast grasping is critical for mobile robots in logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Existing methods face fundamental challenges in impact stabilization under high-speed motion, real-time whole-body coordination, and…
Estimation of tactile properties from vision, such as slipperiness or roughness, is important to effectively interact with the environment. These tactile properties help us decide which actions we should choose and how to perform them.…
Enabling autonomous robots to interact in unstructured environments with dynamic objects requires manipulation capabilities that can deal with clutter, changes, and objects' variability. This paper presents a comparison of different…
How should a robot direct active vision so as to ensure reliable grasping? We answer this question for the case of dexterous grasping of unfamiliar objects. By dexterous grasping we simply mean grasping by any hand with more than two…
We study gravitational pivoting, a constrained version of in-hand manipulation, where we aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper. To achieve this, instead of controlling the gripper to avoid…
Tactile information plays a critical role in human dexterity. It reveals useful contact information that may not be inferred directly from vision. In fact, humans can even perform in-hand dexterous manipulation without using vision. Can we…
Continuous in-hand manipulation is an important physical interaction skill, where tactile sensing provides indispensable contact information to enable dexterous manipulation of small objects. This work proposed a framework for end-to-end…
This paper proposes Tac2Motion, a contact-aware reinforcement learning framework to facilitate the learning of contact-rich in-hand manipulation tasks, such as removing a lid. To this end, we propose tactile sensing-based reward shaping and…
This paper presents a novel manipulation strategy that uses keypoint correspondences extracted from visuo-tactile sensor images to facilitate precise object manipulation. Our approach uses the visuo-tactile feedback to guide the robot's…
Touch sensing is widely acknowledged to be important for dexterous robotic manipulation, but exploiting tactile sensing for continuous, non-prehensile manipulation is challenging. General purpose control techniques that are able to…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Non-prehensile pushing to move and reorient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In the real world, the object's physical properties and friction with the floor contain significant uncertainties, which makes the task…
Manipulating deformable objects in robotic cells is often costly and not widely accessible. However, the use of localized pneumatic gripping systems can enhance accessibility. Current methods that use pneumatic grippers to handle deformable…
Thin plastic bags are ubiquitous in retail stores, healthcare, food handling, recycling, homes, and school lunchrooms. They are challenging both for perception (due to specularities and occlusions) and for manipulation (due to the dynamics…
Reaching-and-grasping is a fundamental skill for robotic manipulation, but existing methods usually train models on a specific gripper and cannot be reused on another gripper. In this paper, we propose a novel method that can learn a…
Grasping an object when it is in an ungraspable pose is a challenging task, such as books or other large flat objects placed horizontally on a table. Inspired by human manipulation, we address this problem by pushing the object to the edge…
Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping…