Related papers: Cable Routing and Assembly using Tactile-driven Mo…
Cables are complex, high dimensional, and dynamic objects. Standard approaches to manipulate them often rely on conservative strategies that involve long series of very slow and incremental deformations, or various mechanical fixtures such…
The manipulation of deformable linear flexures has a wide range of applications in industry, such as cable routing in automotive manufacturing and textile production. Cable routing, as a complex multi-stage robot manipulation scenario, is a…
We study the problem of learning to perform multi-stage robotic manipulation tasks, with applications to cable routing, where the robot must route a cable through a series of clips. This setting presents challenges representative of complex…
Existing research that addressed cable manipulation relied on two-fingered grippers, which make it difficult to perform similar cable manipulation tasks that humans perform. However, unlike dexterous manipulation of rigid objects, the…
Micro-scale continuum robots face significant limitations in achieving three-dimensional contact force perception, primarily due to structural miniaturization, nonlinear mechanical, and sensor integration. To overcome these limitations,…
Cabling tasks (pulling, clipping, and plug insertion) are today mostly manual work, limiting the cost-effectiveness of electrification. Feasibility for the robotic grasping and insertion of plugs, as well as the manipulation of cables, have…
Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…
Manipulation of objects within a robot's hand is one of the most important challenges in achieving robot dexterity. The "Roller Graspers" refers to a family of non-anthropomorphic hands utilizing motorized, rolling fingertips to achieve…
Many order fulfillment applications in logistics, such as packing, involve picking objects from unstructured piles before tightly arranging them in bins or shipping containers. Desirable robotic solutions in this space need to be low-cost,…
It is difficult for robots to retrieve objects in densely cluttered lateral access scenes with movable objects as jamming against adjacent objects and walls can inhibit progress. We propose the use of two action primitives -- burrowing and…
Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
This paper tackles the problem of robots collaboratively towing a load with cables to a specified goal location while avoiding collisions in real time. The introduction of cables (as opposed to rigid links) enables the robotic team to…
ReachBot, a proposed robotic platform, employs extendable booms as limbs for mobility in challenging environments, such as martian caves. When attached to the environment, ReachBot acts as a parallel robot, with reconfiguration driven by…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a desired skill in making robots ubiquitous in manufacturing, service, healthcare, and security. Deformable objects are common in our daily lives, e.g., wires, clothes, bed sheets, etc., and are…
Tactile perception is essential for real-world manipulation tasks, yet the high cost and fragility of tactile sensors can limit their practicality. In this work, we explore BeadSight (a low-cost, open-source tactile sensor) alongside a…
Humans can effortlessly perform very complex, dexterous manipulation tasks by reacting to sensor observations. In contrast, robots can not perform reactive manipulation and they mostly operate in open-loop while interacting with their…
This paper develops closed-loop tactile controllers for dexterous robotic manipulation with a dual-palm robotic system. Tactile dexterity is an approach to dexterous manipulation that plans for robot/object interactions that render…
A cable-driven soft-bodied robot with redundancy can conduct the trajectory tracking task and in the meanwhile fulfill some extra constraints, such as tracking through an end-effector in designated orientation, or get rid of the evitable…