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Manipulation planning and control are relevant building blocks of a robotic system and their tight integration is a key factor to improve robot autonomy and allows robots to perform manipulation tasks of increasing complexity, such as those…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
We address the problem of controlling a mobile robot to explore a partially known environment. The robot's objective is the maximization of the amount of information collected about the environment. We formulate the problem as a partially…
Humans, in comparison to robots, are remarkably adept at reaching for objects in cluttered environments. The best existing robot planners are based on random sampling of configuration space -- which becomes excessively high-dimensional with…
Motion planning in high-dimensional space is a challenging task. In order to perform dexterous manipulation in an unstructured environment, a robot with many degrees of freedom is usually necessary, which also complicates its motion…
A common way to manipulate heavy objects is to maintain at least one point of the object in contact with the environment during the manipulation. When the object has a cylindrical shape or, in general, a curved edge, not only sliding and…
Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer…
In warehouse and manufacturing environments, manipulation platforms are frequently deployed at conveyor belts to perform pick and place tasks. Because objects on the conveyor belts are moving, robots have limited time to pick them up. This…
Dynamic manipulation, such as robot tossing or throwing objects, has recently gained attention as a novel paradigm to speed up logistic operations. However, the focus has predominantly been on the object's landing location, irrespective of…
Manipulation of large objects over long horizons (such as carts in a warehouse) is an essential skill for deployable robotic systems. Large objects require mobile manipulation which involves simultaneous manipulation, navigation, and…
Existing learning approaches to dexterous manipulation use demonstrations or interactions with the environment to train black-box neural networks that provide little control over how the robot learns the skills or how it would perform post…
Recently, robots have seen rapidly increasing use in homes and warehouses to declutter by collecting objects from a planar surface and placing them into a container. While current techniques grasp objects individually, Multi-Object Grasping…
Robots are expected to replace menial tasks such as housework. Some of these tasks include nonprehensile manipulation performed without grasping objects. Nonprehensile manipulation is very difficult because it requires considering the…
We propose a planning and control approach to physics-based manipulation. The key feature of the algorithm is that it can adapt to the accuracy requirements of a task, by slowing down and generating `careful' motion when the task requires…
Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…
Given the task of positioning a ball-like object to a goal region beyond direct reach, humans can often throw, slide, or rebound objects against the wall to attain the goal. However, enabling robots to reason similarly is non-trivial.…
Nowadays, a number of grasping algorithms have been proposed, that can predict a candidate of grasp poses, even for unseen objects. This enables a robotic manipulator to pick-and-place such objects. However, some of the predicted grasp…
Planning a path for a nonholonomic robot is a challenging topic in motion planning and it becomes more difficult when the desired path contains narrow passages. This kind of scenario can arise, for instance, when quadcopters search a…
Contact-rich manipulation often requires strategic interactions with objects, such as pushing to accomplish specific tasks. We propose a novel scenario where a robot inserts a book into a crowded shelf by pushing aside neighboring books to…
Several robot manipulation tasks are extremely sensitive to variations of the physical properties of the manipulated objects. One such task is manipulating objects by using gravity or arm accelerations, increasing the importance of mass,…