Related papers: Contact-Aware Non-prehensile Robotic Manipulation …
Objects with large base areas become ungraspable when they exceed the end-effector's maximum aperture. Existing approaches address this limitation through extrinsic dexterity, which exploits environmental features for non-prehensile…
We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…
The empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in the setting of contact-rich manipulation leaves much to be understood from a model-based perspective, where the key difficulties are often attributed to (i) the explosion of contact…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
When searching for objects in cluttered environments, it is often necessary to perform complex interactions in order to move occluding objects out of the way and fully reveal the object of interest and make it graspable. Due to the…
We present PACE, a novel method for modifying motion-captured virtual agents to interact with and move throughout dense, cluttered 3D scenes. Our approach changes a given motion sequence of a virtual agent as needed to adjust to the…
Robotic grasping of arbitrary objects even in completely known environments still remains a challenging problem. Most previously developed algorithms had focused on fingertip grasp, failing to solve the problem even for fully actuated…
In densely cluttered environments, physical interference, visual occlusions, and unstable contacts often cause direct dexterous grasping to fail, while aggressive singulation strategies may compromise safety. Enabling robots to adaptively…
In robotics, contemporary strategies are learning-based, characterized by a complex black-box nature and a lack of interpretability, which may pose challenges in ensuring stability and safety. To address these issues, we propose integrating…
Robotic grasping in cluttered environments is often infeasible due to obstacles preventing possible grasps. Then, pre-grasping manipulation like shifting or pushing an object becomes necessary. We developed an algorithm that can learn, in…
Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…
In this paper, we address the challenge of performing non-prehensile pushing operations with a compliant robotic manipulation system. To ensure safe operations in human-populated environments, robots must comply with external physical…
Robotic grasping in cluttered environments remains a significant challenge due to occlusions and complex object arrangements. We have developed ThinkGrasp, a plug-and-play vision-language grasping system that makes use of GPT-4o's advanced…
Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…
Object rearrangement in a multi-room setup should produce a reasonable plan that reduces the agent's overall travel and the number of steps. Recent state-of-the-art methods fail to produce such plans because they rely on explicit…
We achieved contact-rich flexible object manipulation, which was difficult to control with vision alone. In the unzipping task we chose as a validation task, the gripper grasps the puller, which hides the bag state such as the direction and…
Robots operating in everyday environments must navigate and manipulate within densely cluttered spaces, where physical contact with surrounding objects is unavoidable. Traditional safety frameworks treat contact as unsafe, restricting…
General-purpose robotic end-effectors of limited complexity, like the parallel-jaw gripper, are appealing for their balance of simplicity and effectiveness in a wide range of manipulation tasks. However, while many such manipulators offer…
The accumulation of litter is increasing in many places and is consequently becoming a problem that must be dealt with. In this paper, we present a manipulator robotic system to collect litter in outdoor environments. This system has three…