Related papers: Contact Points Discovery for Soft-Body Manipulatio…
Control techniques like MPC can realize contact-rich manipulation which exploits dynamic information, maintaining friction limits and safety constraints. However, contact geometry and dynamics are required to be known. This information is…
Contact-based motion planning for manipulation, object exploration or balancing often requires finding sequences of fixed and sliding contacts and planning the transition from one contact in the environment to another. However, most…
This paper addresses the problem of contact-based manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) towards desired shapes with a dual-arm robotic system. To alleviate the burden of high-dimensional continuous state-action spaces, we model…
Non-prehensile manipulation enables fast interactions with objects by circumventing the need to grasp and ungrasp as well as handling objects that cannot be grasped through force closure. Current approaches to non-prehensile manipulation…
Accurate modelling of object deformations is crucial for a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, where interacting with soft or deformable objects is essential. Current methods struggle to generalise to unseen forces or adapt to new…
Differentiable physics enables efficient gradient-based optimizations of neural network (NN) controllers. However, existing work typically only delivers NN controllers with limited capability and generalizability. We present a practical…
Understanding the contact between rough surfaces undergoing plastic deformation is crucial in many applications. We study the effect of plastic deformation on the surface separation between two solids with random roughness. Assuming a…
This work introduces an analytical approach for detecting and estimating external forces acting on deformable linear objects (DLOs) using only their observed shapes. In many robot-wire interaction tasks, contact occurs not at the…
This paper presents a data-efficient approach to learning transferable forward models for robotic push manipulation. Our approach extends our previous work on contact-based predictors by leveraging information on the pushed object's local…
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…
We present a framework for the simulation of rigid and deformable bodies in the presence of contact and friction. Our method is based on a non-smooth Newton iteration that solves the underlying nonlinear complementarity problems (NCPs)…
Soft-tissue surgeries, such as tumor resections, are complicated by tissue deformations that can obscure the accurate location and shape of tissues. By representing tissue surfaces as point clouds and applying non-rigid point cloud…
We study the problem of learning physical object representations for robot manipulation. Understanding object physics is critical for successful object manipulation, but also challenging because physical object properties can rarely be…
Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the…
Discrete simulation methods are efficient tools to investigate the complex behaviors of complex fluids made of either dry granular materials or dilute suspensions. By contrast, materials made of soft and/or concentrated units (emulsions,…
An improved linear model is developed for elasto-plastic and adhesive contact. New correlations are proposed and validated to estimate the key input parameters of the model, including contact stiffness, yield point, maximum pull-off force…
This work introduces a contact interaction methodology for an unbiased treatment of contacting surfaces without assigning surfaces as master and slave. The contact tractions between interacting discrete segments are evaluated with respect…
In this paper, we develop a principled method to model line and surface contact with point contact (we call this point, equivalent contact point) that is consistent with physics-based models of surface (line) contact. Assuming that the set…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
This paper addresses the problem of controlling a continuum manipulator (CM) in free or obstructed environments with no prior knowledge about the deformation behavior of the CM and the stiffness and geometry of the interacting obstructed…