Related papers: Maximizing the Use of Environmental Constraints: A…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…
Robotic manipulation of flexible objects is widely required in both industrial and service applications. Among such objects, paper-like materials exhibit distinct mechanical characteristics compared to cloth, being more sensitive to…
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…
There is an increased demand for task automation in robots. Contact-rich tasks, wherein multiple contact transitions occur in a series of operations, are extensively being studied to realize high accuracy. In this study, we propose a…
Robots often face situations where grasping a goal object is desirable but not feasible due to other present objects preventing the grasp action. We present a deep Reinforcement Learning approach to learn grasping and pushing policies for…
Industrial robots typically require very structured and predictable working environments, and explicit programming, in order to perform well. Therefore, expensive and time-consuming engineering work is a major obstruction when mediating…
Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…
Part assembly is a typical but challenging task in robotics, where robots assemble a set of individual parts into a complete shape. In this paper, we develop a robotic assembly simulation environment for furniture assembly. We formulate the…
Trajectory generation in confined environment is crucial for wide adoption of intelligent robot manipulators. In this paper, we propose a novel motion planning approach for redundant robot arms that uses a hybrid optimization framework to…
Contact-rich manipulation involves kinematic constraints on the task motion, typically with discrete transitions between these constraints during the task. Allowing the robot to detect and reason about these contact constraints can support…
Robots need to manipulate objects in constrained environments like shelves and cabinets when assisting humans in everyday settings like homes and offices. These constraints make manipulation difficult by reducing grasp accessibility, so…
Contact-rich robotic skills remain challenging for industrial robots due to tight geometric tolerances, frictional variability, and uncertain contact dynamics, particularly when using position-controlled manipulators. This paper presents a…
Force control enables hands-on teaching and physical collaboration, with the potential to improve ergonomics and flexibility of automation. Established methods for the design of compliance, impedance control, and \rev{collision response}…
Non-prehensile manipulation such as pushing is typically subject to uncertain, non-smooth dynamics. However, modeling the uncertainty of the dynamics typically results in intractable belief dynamics, making data-efficient planning under…
Individualized manufacturing is becoming an important approach as a means to fulfill increasingly diverse and specific consumer requirements and expectations. While there are various solutions to the implementation of the manufacturing…
Robust and adaptive robotic peg-in-hole assembly under tight tolerances is critical to various industrial applications. However, it remains an open challenge due to perceptual and physical uncertainties from contact-rich interactions that…
A key challenge towards the goal of multi-part assembly tasks is finding robust sensorimotor control methods in the presence of uncertainty. In contrast to previous works that rely on a priori knowledge on whether two parts match, we aim to…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…