Related papers: Tactile-based Exploration, Mapping and Navigation …
Search and rescue environments exhibit challenging 3D geometry (e.g., confined spaces, rubble, and breakdown), which necessitates agile and maneuverable aerial robotic systems. Because these systems are size, weight, and power (SWaP)…
Quadrotors with large thrust-to-weight ratios are able to track aggressive trajectories with sharp turns and high accelerations. In this work, we develop a search-based trajectory planning approach that exploits the quadrotor…
Simulation is widely used in robotics for system verification and large-scale data collection. However, simulating sensors, including tactile sensors, has been a long-standing challenge. In this paper, we propose Taxim, a realistic and…
Tactile perception is a crucial sensing modality in robotics, particularly in scenarios that require precise manipulation and safe interaction with other objects. Previous research in this area has focused extensively on tactile perception…
Vision-language navigation (VLN) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling mobile robots to perform zero-shot inference and execute tasks without specific pre-programming. However, current systems often separate map exploration and path…
Advanced dexterous manipulation involving multiple simultaneous contacts across different surfaces, like pinching coins from ground or manipulating intertwined objects, remains challenging for robotic systems. Such tasks exceed the…
Current methods to estimate object shape---using either vision or touch---generally depend on high-resolution sensing. Here, we exploit ergodic exploration to demonstrate successful shape estimation when using a low-resolution binary…
In decentralized multiagent trajectory planners, agents need to communicate and exchange their positions to generate collision-free trajectories. However, due to localization errors/uncertainties, trajectory deconfliction can fail even if…
Handheld paradigms offer an efficient and intuitive way for collecting large-scale demonstration of robot manipulation. However, achieving contact-rich bimanual manipulation through these methods remains a pivotal challenge, which is…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a challenging task for a robot. It will be problematic to use a single sensory input to track the behaviour of such objects: vision can be subjected to occlusions, whereas tactile inputs cannot capture…
We present a tactile sensing method enabled by the mechanical compliance of soft robots; an externally attachable photoreflective module reads surface deformation of silicone skin to estimate contact force without embedding tactile…
Autonomously exploring the unknown physical properties of novel objects such as stiffness, mass, center of mass, friction coefficient, and shape is crucial for autonomous robotic systems operating continuously in unstructured environments.…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have resulted in their quick adoption for wide a range of civilian applications, including precision agriculture, biosecurity, disaster monitoring and surveillance. UAVs offer low-cost…
This paper presents the design and integration of 3 Survivor, a rough terrain negotiable teleoperated mobile rescue and service robot. 3 Survivor is an improved version of two previously studied surveillance robots named Sigma 3 and Alpha…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that…
Robotic disassembly involves contact-rich interactions in which successful manipulation depends not only on geometric alignment but also on force-dependent state transitions. While vision-based policies perform well in structured settings,…
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…
This work presents the design, hardware realization, autonomous exploration and object detection capabilities of RMF-Owl, a new collision-tolerant aerial robot tailored for resilient autonomous subterranean exploration. The system is custom…
In this paper, we introduce a complete system for autonomous flight of quadrotors in dynamic environments with onboard sensing. Extended from existing work, we develop an occlusion-aware dynamic perception method based on depth images,…