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Robots operating in everyday environments must navigate and manipulate within densely cluttered spaces, where physical contact with surrounding objects is unavoidable. Traditional safety frameworks treat contact as unsafe, restricting…
Safe human-to-robot handovers of unknown objects require accurate estimation of hand poses and object properties, such as shape, trajectory, and weight. Accurately estimating these properties requires the use of scanned 3D object models or…
When presented with an unknown robot (subject) how can an autonomous agent (learner) figure out what this new robot can do? The subject's appearance can provide cues to its physical as well as cognitive capabilities. Seeing a humanoid can…
Maintaining balance under external hand forces is critical for humanoid bimanual manipulation, where interaction forces propagate through the kinematic chain and constrain the feasible manipulation envelope. We propose \textbf{FAME}, a…
As robots enter the messy human world so the vital matter of safety takes on a fresh complexion with physical contact becoming inevitable and even desirable. We report on an artistic-exploration of how dancers, working as part of a…
Humans and animals are capable of learning a new behavior by observing others perform the skill just once. We consider the problem of allowing a robot to do the same -- learning from a raw video pixels of a human, even when there is…
Complex robotic systems require whole-body controllers to deal with contact interactions, handle closed kinematic chains, and track task-space control objectives. However, for many applications, safety-critical controllers are important to…
Many works in collaborative robotics and human-robot interaction focuses on identifying and predicting human behaviour while considering the information about the robot itself as given. This can be the case when sensors and the robot are…
This paper presents Words2Contact, a language-guided multi-contact placement pipeline leveraging large language models and vision language models. Our method is a key component for language-assisted teleoperation and human-robot…
Learning from humans allows non-experts to program robots with ease, lowering the resources required to build complex robotic solutions. Nevertheless, such data-driven approaches often lack the ability to provide guarantees regarding their…
Entanglements like vines and branches in natural settings or cords and pipes in human spaces prevent mobile robots from accessing many environments. Legged robots should be effective in these settings, and more so than wheeled or tracked…
Adaptive recovery from fall incidents are essential skills for the practical deployment of wheeled-legged robots, which uniquely combine the agility of legs with the speed of wheels for rapid recovery. However, traditional methods relying…
The progressive prevalence of robots in human-suited environments has given rise to a myriad of object manipulation techniques, in which dexterity plays a paramount role. It is well-established that humans exhibit extraordinary dexterity…
This paper presents a framework for dynamic object catching using a quadruped robot's front legs while it stands on its rear legs. The system integrates computer vision, trajectory prediction, and leg control to enable the quadruped to…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in addressing complex robotic challenges. In real-world applications, RL is often accompanied by failsafe controllers as a last resort to avoid catastrophic events. While necessary for…
Object handover is a common form of interaction that is widely present in collaborative tasks. However, achieving it efficiently remains a challenge. We address the problem of ensuring resilient robotic actions that can adapt to complex…
Safety for physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is a major concern for all application domains. While current standardization for industrial robot applications provide safety constraints that address the onset of pain in blunt impacts,…
Balance control is important for human and bipedal robotic systems. While dynamic balance during locomotion has received considerable attention, quantitative understanding of static balance and falling remains limited. This work presents a…
For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…
This study addresses the problem of occluded grasping, where primary grasp configurations of an object are not available due to occlusion with environment. Simple parallel grippers often struggle with such tasks due to limited dexterity and…