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Manipulation planning and control are relevant building blocks of a robotic system and their tight integration is a key factor to improve robot autonomy and allows robots to perform manipulation tasks of increasing complexity, such as those…

Stowing, the task of placing objects in cluttered shelves or bins, is a common task in warehouse and manufacturing operations. However, this task is still predominantly carried out by human workers as stowing is challenging to automate due…

Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…

In todays world of smart living, the smart laptop bag, presented in this paper, provides a better solution to keep track of our precious possessions and monitoring them in real time. As the world moves towards a much tech-savvy direction,…

Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability…

Locating and grasping of objects by robots is typically performed using visual sensors. Haptic feedback from contacts with the environment is only secondary if present at all. In this work, we explored an extreme case of searching for and…

Service robots are appearing more and more in our daily life. The development of service robots combines multiple fields of research, from object perception to object manipulation. The state-of-the-art continues to improve to make a proper…

Algorithmic thinking is a central concept in the context of computational thinking, and it is commonly taught by computer programming. A recent trend is to introduce basic programming concepts already very early on at primary school level.…

This paper presents a soft robot finger capable of adaptive-twist deformation to grasp objects by wrapping them. For a soft hand to grasp and pick-up one object from densely contained multiple objects, a soft finger requires the…

Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…

Automating warehouse operations can reduce logistics overhead costs, ultimately driving down the final price for consumers, increasing the speed of delivery, and enhancing the resiliency to workforce fluctuations. The past few years have…

The young infant explores its body, its sensorimotor system, and the immediately accessible parts of its environment, over the course of a few months creating a model of peripersonal space useful for reaching and grasping objects around it.…

Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in…

As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…

Manipulating deformable objects, such as fabric, is a long standing problem in robotics, with state estimation and control posing a significant challenge for traditional methods. In this paper, we show that it is possible to learn fabric…

This manuscript introduces an object deformability-agnostic framework for co-carrying tasks that are shared between a person and multiple robots. Our approach allows the full control of the co-carrying trajectories by the person while…

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,…

Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…

Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…

Image classification is the task of assigning to an input image a label from a fixed set of categories. One of its most important applicative fields is that of robotics, in particular the needing of a robot to be aware of what's around and…