Related papers: TANDEM: Learning Joint Exploration and Decision Ma…

Simulators perform an important role in prototyping, debugging, and benchmarking new advances in robotics and learning for control. Although many physics engines exist, some aspects of the real world are harder than others to simulate. One…

Tactile sensing is a fundamental modality for embodied intelligence, offering unique and direct feedback on contact geometry, material properties, and interaction dynamics that remote sensors cannot replace. However, unimodal tactile…

Manipulation of deformable objects is a challenging task for a robot. It will be problematic to use a single sensory input to track the behaviour of such objects: vision can be subjected to occlusions, whereas tactile inputs cannot capture…

The research aims to expand tactile feedback beyond vibrations to various modes of stimuli, such as indentation, vibration, among others. By incorporating soft material into the design of a novel tactile actuator, we can achieve…

We study the problem of object retrieval in scenarios where visual sensing is absent, object shapes are unknown beforehand and objects can move freely, like grabbing objects out of a drawer. Successful solutions require localizing free…

Generative models such as diffusion models, excel at capturing high-dimensional distributions with diverse input modalities, e.g. robot trajectories, but are less effective at multi-step constraint reasoning. Task and Motion Planning (TAMP)…

Robot assistive navigation (RAN) is critical for enhancing the mobility and independence of the growing population of mobility-impaired individuals. However, existing systems often rely on interfaces that fail to replicate the intuitive and…

Humans have exceptional tactile sensing capabilities, which they can leverage to solve challenging, partially observable tasks that cannot be solved from visual observation alone. Research in tactile sensing attempts to unlock this new…

Employing skin-like tactile sensors on robots enhances both the safety and usability of collaborative robots by adding the capability to detect human contact. Unfortunately, simple binary tactile sensors alone cannot determine the context…

We are witnessing significant progress on perception models, specifically those trained on large-scale internet images. However, efficiently generalizing these perception models to unseen embodied tasks is insufficiently studied, which will…

Tactile sensing is vital for human dexterous manipulation, however, it has not been widely used in robotics. Compact, low-cost sensing platforms can facilitate a change, but unlike their popular optical counterparts, they are difficult to…

Task decomposition is critical for understanding and learning complex long-horizon manipulation tasks. Especially for tasks involving rich physical interactions, relying solely on visual observations and robot proprioceptive information…

We study the problem of using high-resolution tactile sensors to control the insertion of objects in a box-packing scenario. We propose a new system based on a tactile sensor GelSlim for the dense packing task. In this paper, we propose an…

Rapid deployment of new tactile sensors is essential for scalable robotic manipulation, especially in multi-fingered hands equipped with vision-based tactile sensors. However, current methods for inferring contact properties rely heavily on…

Much of the literature on robotic perception focuses on the visual modality. Vision provides a global observation of a scene, making it broadly useful. However, in the domain of robotic manipulation, vision alone can sometimes prove…

Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we…

Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…

Tactile sensing plays an irreplaceable role in robotic material recognition. It enables robots to distinguish material properties such as their local geometry and textures, especially for materials like textiles. However, most tactile…

One of the most important object properties that humans and robots perceive through touch is hardness. This paper investigates information-theoretic active sampling strategies for sample-efficient hardness classification with vision-based…

This report presents the experimental methodology and a step-by-step guide for gathering data on how aging influences tactile surface perception in decision and action. The experiments consist of a set of trials in which the ability to…