Related papers: Curiosity Driven Self-supervised Tactile Explorati…
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…
Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…
This project proposes a bioinspired multi-robot system using Distributed Optimization for efficient exploration and mapping of unknown environments. Each robot explores its environment and creates a map, which is afterwards put together to…
Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…
In general, robotic dexterous hands are equipped with various sensors for acquiring multimodal contact information such as position, force, and pose of the grasped object. This multi-sensor-based design adds complexity to the robotic…
Teaching dexterity to multi-fingered robots has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. Most prominent work in this area focuses on learning controllers or policies that either operate on visual observations or state estimates derived…
We study landmark-based SLAM with unknown data association: our robot navigates in a completely unknown environment and has to simultaneously reason over its own trajectory, the positions of an unknown number of landmarks in the…
Traditional control and planning for robotic manipulation heavily rely on precise physical models and predefined action sequences. While effective in structured environments, such approaches often fail in real-world scenarios due to…
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
Visual understanding of 3D environments in real-time, at low power, is a huge computational challenge. Often referred to as SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping), it is central to applications spanning domestic and industrial…
Active visual SLAM finds a wide array of applications in GNSS-Denied sub-terrain environments and outdoor environments for ground robots. To achieve robust localization and mapping accuracy, it is imperative to incorporate the perception…
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or…
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or…
Tactile and visual perception are both crucial for humans to perform fine-grained interactions with their environment. Developing similar multi-modal sensing capabilities for robots can significantly enhance and expand their manipulation…
Exploration is an important step in autonomous navigation of robotic systems. In this paper we introduce a series of enhancements for exploration algorithms in order to use them with vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping…
Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…
Tactile perception is essential for human interaction with the environment and is becoming increasingly crucial in robotics. Tactile sensors like the BioTac mimic human fingertips and provide detailed interaction data. Despite its utility…
Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…
Tactile sensors provide information that can be used to learn and execute manipulation tasks. Different tasks, however, might require different levels of sensory information; which in turn likely affect learning rates and performance. This…
Estimation of tactile properties from vision, such as slipperiness or roughness, is important to effectively interact with the environment. These tactile properties help us decide which actions we should choose and how to perform them.…