Related papers: RoboNinja: Learning an Adaptive Cutting Policy for…

Cutting is a common form of manipulation when working with divisible objects such as food, rope, or clay. Cooking in particular relies heavily on cutting to divide food items into desired shapes. However, cutting food is a challenging task…

This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…

Enabling autonomous robots to interact in unstructured environments with dynamic objects requires manipulation capabilities that can deal with clutter, changes, and objects' variability. This paper presents a comparison of different…

Automating chicken shoulder deboning requires precise 6-DoF cutting through a partially occluded, deformable, multi-material joint, since contact with the bones presents serious health and safety risks. Our work makes both systems-level and…

We introduce SoftMimic, a framework for learning compliant whole-body control policies for humanoid robots from example motions. Imitating human motions with reinforcement learning allows humanoids to quickly learn new skills, but existing…

Robotic cutting is a challenging contact-rich manipulation task where the robot must simultaneously negotiate unknown object mechanics, large contact forces, and precise motion requirements. We introduce a new active virtual-model control…

Food cutting is a highly practical yet underexplored application at the intersection of vision and robotic manipulation. The task remains challenging because interactions between the knife and deformable materials are highly nonlinear and…

Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark of human cognition, tool use in…

Adaptive control for real-time manipulation requires quick estimation and prediction of object properties. While robot learning in this area primarily focuses on using vision, many tasks cannot rely on vision due to object occlusion. Here,…

In robotic surgery, pattern cutting through a deformable material is a challenging research field. The cutting procedure requires a robot to concurrently manipulate a scissor and a gripper to cut through a predefined contour trajectory on…

This paper introduces a new method for safety-aware robot learning, focusing on repairing policies using predictive models. Our method combines behavioral cloning with neural network repair in a two-step supervised learning framework. It…

Modelling of contact-rich tasks is challenging and cannot be entirely solved using classical control approaches due to the difficulty of constructing an analytic description of the contact dynamics. Additionally, in a manipulation task like…

Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…

Robotic grinding is widely used for shaping workpieces in manufacturing, but it remains difficult to automate this process efficiently. In particular, efficiently grinding workpieces of different shapes and material hardness is challenging…

Robotic tree pruning requires highly precise manipulator control in order to accurately align a cutting implement with the desired pruning point at the correct angle. Simultaneously, the robot must avoid applying excessive force to rigid…

Cooking robots can enhance the home experience by reducing the burden of daily chores. However, these robots must perform their tasks dexterously and safely in shared human environments, especially when handling dangerous tools such as…

Robotic manipulation of deformable and fragile objects presents significant challenges, as excessive stress can lead to irreversible damage to the object. While existing solutions rely on accurate object models or specialized sensors and…

Data-driven approaches for modelling contact-rich tasks address many of the difficulties that analytical models bear. For real-world scenarios, the hardware capabilities constrain the available measurements and consequently, every step of…

With the goal of developing fully autonomous cooking robots, developing robust systems that can chop a wide variety of objects is important. Existing approaches focus primarily on the low-level dynamics of the cutting action, which…

Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…