Related papers: Towards Generalized Robot Assembly through Complia…

Robust and adaptive robotic peg-in-hole assembly under tight tolerances is critical to various industrial applications. However, it remains an open challenge due to perceptual and physical uncertainties from contact-rich interactions that…

Insertion operations are a critical element of most robotic assembly operation, and peg-in-hole (PiH) insertion is one of the most widely studied tasks in the industrial and academic manipulation communities. PiH insertion is in fact an…

We present the design of a learning-based compliance controller for assembly operations for industrial robots. We propose a solution within the general setting of learning from demonstration (LfD), where a nominal trajectory is provided…

Object insertion tasks are prone to failure under pose uncertainty and environmental variation, often requiring manual fine-tuning or controller retraining. We present a novel approach for robust and resilient object insertion using a…

In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We…

The pattern formation task is commonly seen in a multi-robot system. In this paper, we study the problem of forming complex shapes with functionally limited mobile robots, which have to rely on other robots to precisely locate themselves.…

This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the…

To substantially enhance robot intelligence, there is a pressing need to develop a large model that enables general-purpose robots to proficiently undertake a broad spectrum of manipulation tasks, akin to the versatile task-planning ability…

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

Robots in our daily surroundings are increasing day by day. Their usability and acceptability largely depend on their explicit and implicit interaction capability with fellow human beings. As a result, social behavior is one of the most…

We present an approach to robotic manipulation of unknown objects through regulation of the object's contact configuration: the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the object, robot, and environment. A contact configuration…

Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception…

Is it possible to learn policies for robotic assembly that can generalize to new objects? We explore this idea in the context of the kit assembly task. Since classic methods rely heavily on object pose estimation, they often struggle to…

The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…

We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…

Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…

In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…

Grasping compliant objects is difficult for robots - applying too little force may cause the grasp to fail, while too much force may lead to object damage. A robot needs to apply the right amount of force to quickly and confidently grasp…

A key challenge towards the goal of multi-part assembly tasks is finding robust sensorimotor control methods in the presence of uncertainty. In contrast to previous works that rely on a priori knowledge on whether two parts match, we aim to…

We present a convex formulation of compliant frictional contact and a robust, performant method to solve it in practice. By analytically eliminating contact constraints, we obtain an unconstrained convex problem. Our solver has proven…