Related papers: Curiosity Driven Self-supervised Tactile Explorati…

Damage recovery is critical for autonomous robots that need to operate for a long time without assistance. Most current methods are complex and costly because they require anticipating each potential damage in order to have a contingency…

Humans rely on their visual and tactile senses to develop a comprehensive 3D understanding of their physical environment. Recently, there has been a growing interest in exploring and manipulating objects using data-driven approaches that…

In search and rescue missions, time is an important factor; fast navigation and quickly acquiring situation awareness might be matters of life and death. Hence, the use of robots in such scenarios has been restricted by the time needed to…

With the development of robot electronic skin technology, various tactile sensors, enhanced by AI, are unlocking a new dimension of perception for robots. In this work, we explore how robots equipped with electronic skin can recognize…

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…

Robotic manipulation has made significant advancements, with systems demonstrating high precision and repeatability. However, this remarkable precision often fails to translate into efficient manipulation of thin deformable objects. Current…

Tactile sensors have been introduced to a wide range of robotic tasks such as robot manipulation to mimic the sense of human touch. However, there has only been a few works that integrate tactile sensing into robot navigation. This paper…

In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…

For in-hand manipulation, estimation of the object pose inside the hand is one of the important functions to manipulate objects to the target pose. Since in-hand manipulation tends to cause occlusions by the hand or the object itself, image…

Tactile sensing is critical to fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as insertion and assembly. Prior research has shown the possibility of learning tactile-guided policy from teleoperated demonstration data. However, to…

The choice of scene representation is crucial in both the shape inference algorithms it requires and the smart applications it enables. We present efficient and optimisable multi-class learned object descriptors together with a novel…

Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one…

The advancements in vision-based tactile sensors have boosted the aptitude of robots to perform contact-rich manipulation, particularly when precise positioning and contact state of the manipulated objects are crucial for successful…

Autonomous robotic arm manipulators have the potential to make planetary exploration and in-situ resource utilization missions more time efficient and productive, as the manipulator can handle the objects itself and perform goal-specific…

We propose a novel pipeline for unknown object grasping in shared robotic autonomy scenarios. State-of-the-art methods for fully autonomous scenarios are typically learning-based approaches optimised for a specific end-effector, that…

This paper suggests a 2D exploration strategy for a planar space cluttered with obstacles. Rather than using point robots capable of adjusting their position and altitude instantly, this research is tailored to classical agents with…

Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…

Recently, tactile sensing has attracted great interest in robotics, especially for facilitating exploration of unstructured environments and effective manipulation. A detailed understanding of the surface textures via tactile sensing is…

Having the ability to estimate an object's properties through interaction will enable robots to manipulate novel objects. Object's dynamics, specifically the friction and inertial parameters have only been estimated in a lab environment…

Tactile perception is important for robotic systems that interact with the world through touch. Touch is an active sense in which tactile measurements depend on the contact properties of an interaction--e.g., velocity, force,…