Related papers: SPONGE: Sequence Planning with Deformable-ON-Rigid…
We present a system for non-prehensile manipulation that require a significant number of contact mode transitions and the use of environmental contacts to successfully manipulate an object to a target location. Our method is based on deep…
Bagging operations, common in packaging and assisted living applications, are challenging due to a bag's complex deformable properties. To address this, we develop a robotic system for automated bagging tasks using an adaptive…
Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…
Several planners have been developed to compute dynamically feasible, collision-free robot paths from an initial to a goal configuration. A key assumption in these works is that the goal region is reachable; an assumption that often fails…
Long-term complex activity recognition and localisation can be crucial for decision making in autonomous systems such as smart cars and surgical robots. Here we address the problem via a novel deformable, spatiotemporal scene graph…
Automated 3D scene generation is pivotal for applications spanning virtual reality, digital content creation, and Embodied AI. While computer graphics prioritizes aesthetic layouts, vision and robotics demand scenes that mirror real-world…
Learning dexterous and agile policy for humanoid and dexterous hand control requires large-scale demonstrations, but collecting robot-specific data is prohibitively expensive. In contrast, abundant human motion data is readily available…
In this work, we focus on the task of learning and representing dense correspondences in deformable object categories. While this problem has been considered before, solutions so far have been rather ad-hoc for specific object types (i.e.,…
Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…
Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an…
Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Shape servoing, a robotic task dedicated to controlling objects to desired goal shapes, is a promising approach to deformable object manipulation. An issue arises, however, with the reliance on the specification of a goal shape. This goal…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
Recent research efforts have yielded significant advancements in manipulating objects under homogeneous settings where the robot is required to either manipulate rigid or deformable (soft) objects. However, the manipulation under…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
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…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. However, it is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. While…
Glovebox decommissioning tasks usually require manipulating relatively heavy objects in a highly constrained environment. Thus, contact with the surroundings becomes inevitable. In order to allow the robot to interact with the environment…