Related papers: Active entanglement enables stochastic, topologica…
Grasping deformable objects with varying stiffness remains a significant challenge in robotics. Estimating the local stiffness of a target object is important for determining an optimal grasp pose that enables stable pickup without damaging…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
This paper presents the first active object mapping framework for complex robotic manipulation and autonomous perception tasks. The framework is built on an object SLAM system integrated with a simultaneous multi-object pose estimation…
The rise in additive manufacturing comes with unique opportunities and challenges. Massive part customization and rapid design changes are made possible with additive manufacturing, however, manufacturing industries that desire the…
Soft pneumatic gripping strategies are often based on pressurized actuation of structures made of soft elastomeric materials, which limits designs in terms of size, weight, achievable forces, and ease of fabrication. On the other hand,…
Fruit harvesting remains predominantly a labor-intensive process, motivating the development of research for robotic grippers. Conventional rigid or vacuum-driven grippers require complex mechanical design or high energy consumption.…
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…
Activity can organize matter in unique configurations inaccessible to equilibrium systems, including a sundry of spiraling shapes seen in nature that range from galaxies to living tissues to fossilized stromatolites. How these dynamic yet…
Flexible object manipulation of paper and cloth is a major research challenge in robot manipulation. Although there have been efforts to develop hardware that enables specific actions and to realize a single action of paper folding using…
Soft tissue manipulation is an integral aspect of most surgical procedures; however, the vast majority of surgical graspers used today are made of hard materials, such as metals or hard plastics. Furthermore, these graspers predominately…
This paper aims to improve robots' versatility and adaptability by allowing them to use a large variety of end-effector tools and quickly adapt to new tools. We propose AdaGrasp, a method to learn a single grasping policy that generalizes…
We use Brownian dynamics simulations and theory to study the over-damped spatiotemporal dynamics and pattern formation in a fluid-permeated array of equally spaced, active, elastic filaments that are pinned at one end and free at the other.…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
In our daily life, we often encounter objects that are fragile and can be damaged by excessive grasping force, such as fruits. For these objects, it is paramount to grasp gently -- not using the maximum amount of force possible, but rather…
Robotic grasping is one of the most fundamental robotic manipulation tasks and has been actively studied. However, how to quickly teach a robot to grasp a novel target object in clutter remains challenging. This paper attempts to tackle the…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…
Robotic grasping is a fundamental skill across all domains of robot applications. There is a large body of research for grasping objects in table-top scenarios, where finding suitable grasps is the main challenge. In this work, we are…
Grasping is a core task in robotics with various applications. However, most current implementations are primarily designed for rigid items, and their performance drops considerably when handling fragile or deformable materials that require…
Robotic grasping traditionally relies on object features or shape information for learning new or applying already learned grasps. We argue however that such a strong reliance on object geometric information renders grasping and grasp…