Related papers: Revisiting Proprioceptive Sensing for Articulated …
In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…
Vision-based learning methods provide promise for robots to learn complex manipulation tasks. However, how to generalize the learned manipulation skills to real-world interactions remains an open question. In this work, we study robotic…
What does it take to build mobile manipulation systems that can competently operate on previously unseen objects in previously unseen environments? This work answers this question using opening of articulated structures as a mobile…
In physical human-robot collaboration (pHRC) settings, humans and robots collaborate directly in shared environments. Robots must analyze interactions with objects to ensure safety and facilitate meaningful workflows. One critical aspect is…
Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we…
Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…
Palpation, the use of touch in medical examination, is almost exclusively performed by humans. We investigate a proof of concept for an artificial palpation method based on self-supervised learning. Our key idea is that an encoder-decoder…
Assistive devices for indivuals with upper-limb movement often lack controllability and intuitiveness, in particular for grasping function. In this work, we introduce a novel user interface for grasping movement control in which the user…
Articulation perception aims to recover the motion and structure of articulated objects (e.g., drawers and cupboards), and is fundamental to 3D scene understanding in robotics, simulation, and animation. Existing learning-based methods rely…
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…
Proximity perception is a technology that has the potential to play an essential role in the future of robotics. It can fulfill the promise of safe, robust, and autonomous systems in industry and everyday life, alongside humans, as well as…
Proprioception is a human sense that provides feedback from muscles and joints about body position and motion. This key capability keeps us upright, moving, and responding quickly to slips or stumbles. In this paper we discuss a…
To perform household tasks, assistive robots receive commands in the form of user language instructions for tool manipulation. The initial stage involves selecting the intended tool (i.e., object grounding) and grasping it in a…
The vast majority of visual animals actively control their eyes, heads, and/or bodies to direct their gaze toward different parts of their environment. In contrast, recent applications of reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation…
In essence, successful grasp boils down to correct responses to multiple contact events between fingertips and objects. In most scenarios, tactile sensing is adequate to distinguish contact events. Due to the nature of high dimensionality…
Physical contact between hands and objects plays a critical role in human grasps. We show that optimizing the pose of a hand to achieve expected contact with an object can improve hand poses inferred via image-based methods. Given a hand…
For certain manipulation tasks, object pose estimation from head-mounted cameras may not be sufficiently accurate. This is at least in part due to our inability to perfectly calibrate the coordinate frames of today's high degree of freedom…
Learning the skill of human bimanual grasping can extend the capabilities of robotic systems when grasping large or heavy objects. However, it requires a much larger search space for grasp points than single-hand grasping and numerous…
Adaptive control for real-time manipulation requires quick estimation and prediction of object properties. While robot learning in this area primarily focuses on using vision, many tasks cannot rely on vision due to object occlusion. Here,…
This paper presents a novel manipulation strategy that uses keypoint correspondences extracted from visuo-tactile sensor images to facilitate precise object manipulation. Our approach uses the visuo-tactile feedback to guide the robot's…