Related papers: Manipulation of unknown objects via contact config…
Constraining contacts to remain fixed on an object during manipulation limits the potential workspace size, as motion is subject to the hand's kinematic topology. Finger gaiting is one way to alleviate such restraints. It allows contacts to…
Robotic manipulation involves actions where contacts occur between the robot and the objects. In this scope, the availability of physics-based engines allows motion planners to comprise dynamics between rigid bodies, which is necessary for…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
We define "robotic contact juggling" to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or "hand." While specific examples of robotic contact juggling…
We present a framework for deformable object manipulation that interleaves planning and control, enabling complex manipulation tasks without relying on high-fidelity modeling or simulation. The key question we address is when should we use…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
Robots need to manipulate objects in constrained environments like shelves and cabinets when assisting humans in everyday settings like homes and offices. These constraints make manipulation difficult by reducing grasp accessibility, so…
Generally, the normal displacement-based formation control has a sensing mode that requires the agent not only to have certain knowledge of its direction, but also to gather its local information characterized by nonnegative coupling…
For robots to be able to manipulate in unknown and unstructured environments the robot should be capable of operating under partial observability of the environment. Object occlusions and unmodeled environments are some of the factors that…
Extrinsic manipulation, a technique that enables robots to leverage extrinsic resources for object manipulation, presents practical yet challenging scenarios. Particularly in the context of extrinsic manipulation on a supporting plane,…
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…
This thesis is concerned with deriving planning algorithms for robot manipulators. Manipulation has two effects, the robot has a physical effect on the object, and it also acquires information about the object. This thesis presents…
We present a strategy for designing and building very general robot manipulation systems involving the integration of a general-purpose task-and-motion planner with engineered and learned perception modules that estimate properties and…
This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of non-prehensile manipulation using grasped objects. This problem is a superset of many common manipulation skills including instances of tool-use (e.g., grasped spatula flipping a burger) and…
This paper proposes a novel method for understanding daily hand-object manipulation by developing computer vision-based techniques. Specifically, we focus on recognizing hand grasp types, object attributes and manipulation actions within an…
Robot manipulation in cluttered environments often requires complex and sequential rearrangement of multiple objects in order to achieve the desired reconfiguration of the target objects. Due to the sophisticated physical interactions…
A significant problem in designing mobile robot control systems involves coping with the uncertainty that arises in moving about in an unknown or partially unknown environment and relying on noisy or ambiguous sensor data to acquire…
We study the problem of rapidly identifying contact dynamics of unknown objects in partially known environments. The key innovation of our method is a novel formulation of the contact dynamics estimation problem as the joint estimation of…
To use robots in more unstructured environments, we have to accommodate for more complexities. Robotic systems need more awareness of the environment to adapt to uncertainty and variability. Although cameras have been predominantly used in…