Related papers: Visual Haptic Reasoning: Estimating Contact Forces…
Robotic cloth manipulation is a relevant challenging problem for autonomous robotic systems. Highly deformable objects as textile items can adopt multiple configurations and shapes during their manipulation. Hence, robots should not only…
Haptic feedback is important to make robots more dexterous and effective in unstructured environments. High-resolution haptic sensors are still not widely available, and their application is often bound by the resolution-robustness dilemma.…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
We present a novel approach for robust manipulation of high-DOF deformable objects such as cloth. Our approach uses a random forest-based controller that maps the observed visual features of the cloth to an optimal control action of the…
Cloth in the real world is often crumpled, self-occluded, or folded in on itself such that key regions, such as corners, are not directly graspable, making manipulation difficult. We propose a system that leverages visual and tactile…
Humans make extensive use of vision and touch as complementary senses, with vision providing global information about the scene and touch measuring local information during manipulation without suffering from occlusions. While prior work…
Collaborative manipulation is inherently multimodal, with haptic communication playing a central role. When performed by humans, it involves back-and-forth force exchanges between the participants through which they resolve possible…
Learning to manipulate cloth is both a paradigmatic problem for robotic research and a problem of immediate relevance to a variety of applications ranging from assistive care to the service industry. The complex physics of the deformable…
Designing robotic tasks for co-manipulation necessitates to exploit not only proprioceptive but also exteroceptive information for improved safety and autonomy. Following such instinct, this research proposes to formulate intuitive robotic…
When humans see a scene, they can roughly imagine the forces applied to objects based on their experience and use them to handle the objects properly. This paper considers transferring this "force-visualization" ability to robots. We…
In everyday life collaboration tasks between human operators and robots, the former necessitate simple ways for programming new skills, the latter have to show adaptive capabilities to cope with environmental changes. The joint use of…
Humans use semantic concepts such as spatial relations between objects to describe scenes and communicate tasks such as "Put the tea to the right of the cup" or "Move the plate between the fork and the spoon." Just as children, assistive…
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
Despite the advancement in robotic grasping and dexterity through haptic information, affective social touch, such as handshaking or reassuring stroking, remains a major challenge in Human-Robot-Interaction. This position paper examines…
The object perception capabilities of humans are impressive, and this becomes even more evident when trying to develop solutions with a similar proficiency in autonomous robots. While there have been notable advancements in the technologies…
The vast majority of visual animals actively control their eyes, heads, and/or bodies to direct their gaze toward different parts of their environment. In contrast, recent applications of reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation…
Non-flat surfaces pose difficulties for robots operating in unstructured environments. Reconstructions of uneven surfaces may only be partially possible due to non-compliant end-effectors and limitations on vision systems such as…
This paper proposes a unified vision-based manipulation framework using image contours of deformable/rigid objects. Instead of using human-defined cues, the robot automatically learns the features from processed vision data. Our method…
Cloth simulation has wide applications in computer animation, garment design, and robot-assisted dressing. This work presents a differentiable cloth simulator whose additional gradient information facilitates cloth-related applications. Our…