Related papers: Active entanglement enables stochastic, topologica…
Regulating grasping force to reduce slippage during dynamic object interaction remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation, especially when objects are manipulated by multiple rolling contacts, have unknown properties (such as…
Garments with the ability to provide kinesthetic force-feedback on-demand can augment human capabilities in a non-obtrusive way, enabling numerous applications in VR haptics, motion assistance, and robotic control. However, designing such…
Robotic manipulation of deformable, one-dimensional objects (DOOs) like ropes or cables has important potential applications in manufacturing, agriculture, and surgery. In such environments, the task may involve threading through or…
Robot grasping is often formulated as a learning problem. With the increasing speed and quality of physics simulations, generating large-scale grasping data sets that feed learning algorithms is becoming more and more popular. An often…
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering…
Task-aware robotic grasping is a challenging problem that requires the integration of semantic understanding and geometric reasoning. This paper proposes a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and Quality Diversity…
In active matter systems, self-propelled particles can self-organize to undergo collective motion, leading to persistent dynamical behavior out of equilibrium. In cells, cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins self-organize into complex…
Wire harnesses are essential connecting components in manufacturing industry but are challenging to be automated in industrial tasks such as bin picking. They are long, flexible and tend to get entangled when randomly placed in a bin. This…
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…
Recently, suction-based robotic systems with microscopic features or active suction components have been proposed to grip rough and irregular surfaces. However, sophisticated fabrication methods or complex control systems are required for…
Construction throughout history typically assumes that its blueprints and building blocks are pre-determined. However, recent work suggests that alternative approaches can enable new paradigms for structure formation. Aleatory…
Manipulating elasto-plastic objects remains a significant challenge due to severe self-occlusion, difficulties of representation, and complicated dynamics. This work proposes a novel framework for elasto-plastic object manipulation with a…
Experiments have shown that elasticity of disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks is very different from networks with rigid crosslinks. Here, we model and analyze filamentous networks as a collection of randomly oriented…
This study proposed a novel robotic gripper that can achieve grasping and infinite wrist twisting motions using a single actuator. The gripper is equipped with a differential gear mechanism that allows switching between the grasping and…
Active deformable filaments exhibit a large range of qualitatively different three-dimensional dynamics, depending on their flexibility, the strength and nature of the active forcing, and the surrounding environment. We investigate the…
Recently, magnetorheological elastomers have become an interesting smart material with many new designs for robotics. A variety of applications have been built with magnetorheological elastomers, such as vibration absorbers, actuators, or…
When performing cloth-related tasks, such as garment hanging, it is often important to identify and grasp certain structural regions -- a shirt's collar as opposed to its sleeve, for instance. However, due to cloth deformability, these…
Graph-based collaborative filtering is capable of capturing the essential and abundant collaborative signals from the high-order interactions, and thus received increasingly research interests. Conventionally, the embeddings of users and…
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…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…