Related papers: Teaching contact-rich tasks from visual demonstrat…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
We present a planning and control framework for physics-based manipulation under uncertainty. The key idea is to interleave robust open-loop execution with closed-loop control. We derive robustness metrics through contraction theory. We use…
Sim-to-real transfer for contact-rich manipulation remains challenging due to the inherent discrepancy in contact dynamics. While existing methods often rely on costly real-world data or utilize blind compliance through fixed controllers,…
Machine learning techniques have enabled robots to learn narrow, yet complex tasks and also perform broad, yet simple skills with a wide variety of objects. However, learning a model that can both perform complex tasks and generalize to…
Learning highly dynamic behaviors for robots has been a longstanding challenge. Traditional approaches have demonstrated robust locomotion, but the exhibited behaviors lack diversity and agility. They employ approximate models, which lead…
Contact-rich tasks present significant challenges for robotic manipulation policies due to the complex dynamics of contact and the need for precise control. Vision-based policies often struggle with the skill required for such tasks, as…
Demonstration-guided reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning complex behaviors by leveraging both reward feedback and a set of target task demonstrations. Prior approaches for demonstration-guided RL treat every new…
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…
Robot manipulation in a physically-constrained environment requires compliant manipulation. Compliant manipulation is a manipulation skill to adjust hand motion based on the force imposed by the environment. Recently, reinforcement learning…
Gradient-based methods can efficiently optimize controllers by leveraging differentiable simulation and physical priors. However, contact-rich manipulation remains challenging because hybrid contact dynamics often produce discontinuous or…
We introduce multi-task Visuo-Tactile World Models (VT-WM), which capture the physics of contact through touch reasoning. By complementing vision with tactile sensing, VT-WM better understands robot-object interactions in contact-rich…
Learning-based approaches for robotic grasping using visual sensors typically require collecting a large size dataset, either manually labeled or by many trial and errors of a robotic manipulator in the real or simulated world. We propose a…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
Common methods for learning robot dynamics assume motion is continuous, causing unrealistic model predictions for systems undergoing discontinuous impact and stiction behavior. In this work, we resolve this conflict with a smooth, implicit…
A robot's ability to act is fundamentally constrained by what it can perceive. Many existing approaches to visual representation learning utilize general-purpose training criteria, e.g. image reconstruction, smoothness in latent space, or…
We develop a method for learning periodic tasks from visual demonstrations. The core idea is to leverage periodicity in the policy structure to model periodic aspects of the tasks. We use active learning to optimize parameters of rhythmic…
Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches based on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are predominantly applied in the robot joint space, often relying on limited task-specific information and partial awareness of the 3D environment. In…
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…
In this work, we introduce the problem of cross-modal visuo-tactile object recognition with robotic active exploration. With this term, we mean that the robot observes a set of objects with visual perception and, later on, it is able to…
Agile control of mobile manipulator is challenging because of the high complexity coupled by the robotic system and the unstructured working environment. Tracking and grasping a dynamic object with a random trajectory is even harder. In…