Related papers: Mechanical Search on Shelves using a Novel "Blucti…
In response to the growing challenges of manual labor and efficiency in warehouse operations, Amazon has embarked on a significant transformation by incorporating robotics to assist with various tasks. While a substantial number of robots…
In our daily life, cluttered objects are everywhere, from scattered stationery and books cluttering the table to bowls and plates filling the kitchen sink. Retrieving a target object from clutters is an essential while challenging skill for…
Multi-suction-cup grippers are frequently employed to perform pick-and-place robotic tasks, especially in industrial settings where grasping a wide range of light to heavy objects in limited amounts of time is a common requirement. However,…
Indexing moving objects has been extensively studied in the past decades. Moving objects, such as vehicles and mobile device users, usually exhibit some patterns on their velocities, which can be utilized for velocity-based partitioning to…
Dexterous in-hand manipulation remains a foundational challenge in robotics, with progress often constrained by the prevailing paradigm of imitating the human hand. This anthropomorphic approach creates two critical barriers: 1) it limits…
The integration of robotic arm manipulators into industrial manufacturing lines has become common, thanks to their efficiency and effectiveness in executing specific tasks. With advancements in camera technology, visual sensors and…
We consider a novel problem where multiple rigid convex polygonal objects rest in randomly placed positions and orientations on a planar surface visible from an overhead camera. The objective is to efficiently grasp and transport all…
A Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System is a robotised parts-to-picker system that is particularly well-suited for e-commerce warehousing. One distinguishing feature of this type of warehouse is its high storage modularity. Numerous robots are…
Manipulation planning and control are relevant building blocks of a robotic system and their tight integration is a key factor to improve robot autonomy and allows robots to perform manipulation tasks of increasing complexity, such as those…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
Retrieving objects buried beneath multiple objects is not only challenging but also time-consuming. Performing manipulation in such environments presents significant difficulty due to complex contact relationships. Existing methods…
Dense collections of movable objects are common in everyday spaces-from cabinets in a home to shelves in a warehouse. Safely retracting objects from such collections is difficult for robots, yet people do it frequently, leveraging learned…
Search heuristics, particularly those that are evaluation-driven (e.g., evolutionary computation), are often performed in simulation, enabling exploration of large solution spaces. Yet simulation may not truly replicate real-world…
Moving objects to find a fully-occluded target object, known as mechanical search, is a challenging problem in robotics. As objects are often organized semantically, we conjecture that semantic information about object relationships can…
Traditional SLAM algorithms are typically based on artificial features, which lack high-level information. By introducing semantic information, SLAM can own higher stability and robustness rather than purely hand-crafted features. However,…
Tackling simulation optimization problems with non-convex objective functions remains a fundamental challenge in operations research. In this paper, we propose a class of random search algorithms, called Regular Tree Search, which…
In recent years, the demand for service robots capable of executing tasks beyond autonomous navigation has grown. In the future, service robots will be expected to perform complex tasks like 'Set table for dinner'. High-level tasks like…
Multiple-suction-cup grasping can improve the efficiency of bin picking in cluttered scenes. In this paper, we propose a grasp planner for a vacuum gripper to use multiple suction cups to simultaneously grasp multiple objects or an object…
Suction is an important solution for the longstanding robotic grasping problem. Compared with other kinds of grasping, suction grasping is easier to represent and often more reliable in practice. Though preferred in many scenarios, it is…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…