Related papers: Factory: Fast Contact for Robotic Assembly
Mobile autonomous robots have the potential to revolutionize manufacturing processes. However, employing large robot fleets in manufacturing requires addressing challenges including collision-free movement in a shared workspace, effective…
Contact can be conceptualized as a set of constraints imposed on two bodies that are interacting with one another in some way. The nature of a contact, whether a point, line, or surface, dictates how these bodies are able to move with…
Humans excel at bimanual assembly tasks by adapting to rich tactile feedback -- a capability that remains difficult to replicate in robots through behavioral cloning alone, due to the suboptimality and limited diversity of human…
This study tackles the representative yet challenging contact-rich peg-in-hole task of robotic assembly, using a soft wrist that can operate more safely and tolerate lower-frequency control signals than a rigid one. Previous studies often…
Deep reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly popular for robot control algorithms, with the aim for a robot to self-learn useful feature representations from unstructured sensory input leading to the optimal actuation policy. In…
Regardless of their industrial or research application, the streamlining of robot operations is limited by the proximity of experienced users to the actual hardware. Be it massive open online robotics courses, crowd-sourcing of robot task…
Increasing the scale of reinforcement learning experiments has allowed researchers to achieve unprecedented results in both training sophisticated agents for video games, and in sim-to-real transfer for robotics. Typically such experiments…
The simulation of multi-body systems with frictional contacts is a fundamental tool for many fields, such as robotics, computer graphics, and mechanics. Hard frictional contacts are particularly troublesome to simulate because they make the…
Active Force Control (AFC) is an important scheme for tackling high-precision robotic assembly. Classical force controllers are highly surface-dependent: the controller must be carefully tuned for each type of surface in contact, in order…
Robotics simulation plays an important role in the design, development, and verification and validation of robotic systems. Recent studies have shown that simulation may be used as a cheaper, safer, and more reliable alternative to manual,…
Automating the assembly of wire harnesses is challenging in automotive, electrical cabinet, and aircraft production, particularly due to deformable cables and a high variance in connector geometries. In addition, connectors must be inserted…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
Whether rigid or compliant, contact interactions are inherent to robot motions, enabling them to move or manipulate things. Contact interactions result from complex physical phenomena, that can be mathematically cast as Nonlinear…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Industrial human-robot collaborative systems must be validated thoroughly with regard to safety. The sooner potential hazards for workers can be exposed, the less costly is the implementation of necessary changes. Due to the complexity of…
Morphing materials allow us to create new modalities of interaction and fabrication by leveraging dynamic behaviors of materials. Yet, despite the ongoing rapid growth of computational tools within this realm, current developments are…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
Reinforcement learning and sim-to-real transfer have made significant progress in dexterous manipulation. However, progress remains limited by the difficulty of simulating complex contact dynamics and multisensory signals, especially…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. It is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines these modalities which have very different characteristics.…
Simulating rigid-body dynamics with contact in a fast, massively vectorizable, and smoothly differentiable manner is highly desirable in robotics. An important bottleneck faced by existing differentiable simulation frameworks is contact…