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Nowadays robots play an increasingly important role in our daily life. In human-centered environments, robots often encounter piles of objects, packed items, or isolated objects. Therefore, a robot must be able to grasp and manipulate…

The ability to place objects in the environment is an important skill for a personal robot. An object should not only be placed stably, but should also be placed in its preferred location/orientation. For instance, a plate is preferred to…

Interactive perception enables robots to manipulate the environment and objects to bring them into states that benefit the perception process. Deformable objects pose challenges to this due to significant manipulation difficulty and…

Robotic cloth manipulation remains challenging due to the high-dimensional state space of fabrics, their deformable nature, and frequent occlusions that limit vision-based sensing. Although dual-arm systems can mitigate some of these…

This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…

Robotic deformable-object manipulation is a challenge in the robotic industry because deformable objects have complicated and various object states. Predicting those object states and updating manipulation planning is time-consuming and…

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…

Limb loss affects millions globally, impairing physical function and reducing quality of life. Most traditional surface electromyographic (sEMG) and semi-autonomous methods require users to generate myoelectric signals for each control,…

Solid particles, such as rice and coffee beans, are commonly stored in containers and are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Understanding those particles' properties could help us make later decisions or perform later manipulation tasks such…

Visual inspection is a crucial yet time-consuming task across various industries. Numerous established methods employ machine learning in inspection tasks, necessitating specific training data that includes predefined inspection poses and…

Humans train robots to complete tasks in one environment, and expect robots to perform those same tasks in new environments. As humans, we know which aspects of the environment (i.e., the state) are relevant to the task. But there are also…

The ability to visually recognize objects is a fundamental skill for robotics systems. Indeed, a large variety of tasks involving manipulation, navigation or interaction with other agents, deeply depends on the accurate understanding of the…

Vision-based learning methods provide promise for robots to learn complex manipulation tasks. However, how to generalize the learned manipulation skills to real-world interactions remains an open question. In this work, we study robotic…

Robots that assist humans will need to interact with articulated objects such as cabinets or microwaves. Early work on creating systems for doing so used proprioceptive sensing to estimate joint mechanisms during contact. However, nowadays,…

Humans excel in grasping and manipulating objects because of their life-long experience and knowledge about the 3D shape and weight distribution of objects. However, the lack of such intuition in robots makes robotic grasping an…

When limited by their own morphologies, humans and some species of animals have the remarkable ability to use objects from the environment toward accomplishing otherwise impossible tasks. Robots might similarly unlock a range of additional…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

The ability to perform in-hand manipulation still remains an unsolved problem; having this capability would allow robots to perform sophisticated tasks requiring repositioning and reorienting of grasped objects. In this work, we present a…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

Recent advances in visuomotor policy learning have enabled robots to perform control directly from visual inputs. Yet, extending such end-to-end learning from single-arm to bimanual manipulation remains challenging due to the need for both…