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People with Visual Impairments (PVI) typically recognize objects through haptic perception. Knowing objects and materials before touching is desired by the target users but under-explored in the field of human-centered robotics. To fill…
We present ActiveUMI, a framework for a data collection system that transfers in-the-wild human demonstrations to robots capable of complex bimanual manipulation. ActiveUMI couples a portable VR teleoperation kit with sensorized controllers…
Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…
The progressive prevalence of robots in human-suited environments has given rise to a myriad of object manipulation techniques, in which dexterity plays a paramount role. It is well-established that humans exhibit extraordinary dexterity…
Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we…
Autonomous mobile manipulation robots that can collect trolleys are widely used to liberate human resources and fight epidemics. Most prior robotic trolley collection solutions only detect trolleys with 2D poses or are merely based on…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
Manipulating deformable objects has long been a challenge in robotics due to its high dimensional state representation and complex dynamics. Recent success in deep reinforcement learning provides a promising direction for learning to…
Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is…
From refrigerators to kitchen drawers, humans interact with articulated objects effortlessly every day while completing household chores. For automating these tasks, service robots must be capable of manipulating arbitrary articulated…
This work aims to learn how to perform complex robot manipulation tasks that are composed of several, consecutively executed low-level sub-tasks, given as input a few visual demonstrations of the tasks performed by a person. The sub-tasks…
We develop two novel vision methods for planning effective grasps for clear plastic bags, as well as a control method to enable a Sawyer arm with a parallel gripper to execute the grasps. The first vision method is based on classical image…
Opening sterile medical packaging is routine for healthcare workers but remains challenging for robots. Learning from demonstration enables robots to acquire manipulation skills directly from humans, and handheld gripper tools such as the…
We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling approaches…
Advanced machine learning algorithms require platforms that are extremely robust and equipped with rich sensory feedback to handle extensive trial-and-error learning without relying on strong inductive biases. Traditional robotic designs,…
To have a robot actively supporting a human during a collaborative task, it is crucial that robots are able to identify the current action in order to predict the next one. Common approaches make use of high-level knowledge, such as object…
This paper tackles the task of singulating and grasping paper-like deformable objects. We refer to such tasks as paper-flipping. In contrast to manipulating deformable objects that lack compression strength (such as shirts and ropes), minor…
Placing is a necessary skill for a personal robot to have in order to perform tasks such as arranging objects in a disorganized room. The object placements should not only be stable but also be in their semantically preferred placing areas…
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…
Machine learning techniques rely on large and diverse datasets for generalization. Computer vision, natural language processing, and other applications can often reuse public datasets to train many different models. However, due to…