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Physical interaction between humans and robots can help robots learn to perform complex tasks. The robot arm gains information by observing how the human kinesthetically guides it throughout the task. While prior works focus on how the…
Tactile sensing is critical to fine-grained, contact-rich manipulation tasks, such as insertion and assembly. Prior research has shown the possibility of learning tactile-guided policy from teleoperated demonstration data. However, to…
Predicting the outcomes of robotic actions, often referred to as learning a world model, in complex environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual observations and action inputs to…
Optical tactile sensors play a pivotal role in robot perception and manipulation tasks. The membrane of these sensors can be painted with markers or remain markerless, enabling them to function in either marker or markerless mode. However,…
The perception and recognition of the surroundings is one of the essential tasks for a robot. With preliminary knowledge about a target object, it can perform various manipulation tasks such as rolling motion, palpation, and force control.…
We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
Legged robots constructed from soft materials are commonly claimed to demonstrate safer, more robust environmental interactions than their rigid counterparts. However, this motivating feature of soft robots requires more rigorous…
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…
The technological transition from soft machines to soft robots necessarily passes through the integration of soft electronics and sensors. This allows for the establishment of feedback control systems while preserving the softness of the…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Advanced service robots require superior tactile intelligence to guarantee human-contact safety and to provide essential supplements to visual and auditory information for human-robot interaction, especially when a robot is in physical…
Human demonstrations collected by wearable devices (e.g., tactile gloves) provide fast and dexterous supervision for policy learning, and are guided by rich, natural tactile feedback. However, a key challenge is how to transfer…
Tactile sensing in soft robots remains particularly challenging because of the coupling between contact and deformation information which the sensor is subject to during actuation and interaction with the environment. This often results in…
Mobile robots operating in crowded environments require the ability to navigate among humans and surrounding obstacles efficiently while adhering to safety standards and socially compliant mannerisms. This scale of the robot navigation…
Vision-based tactile sensors that can measure 3D geometry of the contacting objects are crucial for robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks. However, the existing sensors are usually complicated to fabricate and delicate to extend.…
Picking up transparent objects is still a challenging task for robots. The visual properties of transparent objects such as reflection and refraction make the current grasping methods that rely on camera sensing fail to detect and localise…
The research aims to expand tactile feedback beyond vibrations to various modes of stimuli, such as indentation, vibration, among others. By incorporating soft material into the design of a novel tactile actuator, we can achieve…
Contact often occurs without macroscopic surface deformation, such as during interaction with liquids, semi-liquids, or ultra-soft materials. However, most existing tactile sensors rely on deformation to infer contact, making such…