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Robotic manipulation of deformable objects gains great attention due to its wide applications including medical surgery, home assistance, and automatic food preparation. The ability to deform soft objects remains a great challenge for…

Visual inspection is a crucial yet time-consuming task across various industries. Numerous established methods employ machine learning in inspection tasks, necessitating specific training data that includes predefined inspection poses and…

Modern robotic manipulation primarily relies on visual observations in a 2D color space for skill learning but suffers from poor generalization. In contrast, humans, living in a 3D world, depend more on physical properties-such as distance,…

Flexible object manipulation of paper and cloth is a major research challenge in robot manipulation. Although there have been efforts to develop hardware that enables specific actions and to realize a single action of paper folding using…

Human-robot co-manipulation of soft materials, such as fabrics, composites, and sheets of paper/cardboard, is a challenging operation that presents several relevant industrial applications. Estimating the deformation state of the…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

State estimation from measured data is crucial for robotic applications as autonomous systems rely on sensors to capture the motion and localize in the 3D world. Among sensors that are designed for measuring a robot's pose, or for soft…

Robotic packaging using wrapping paper poses significant challenges due to the material's complex deformation properties. The packaging process itself involves multiple steps, primarily categorized as folding the paper or creating creases.…

The world around us is full of soft objects we perceive and deform with dexterous hand movements. For a robotic hand to control soft objects, it has to acquire online state feedback of the deforming object. While RGB-D cameras can collect…

We address the problem of shaping deformable plastic materials using non-prehensile actions. Shaping plastic objects is challenging, since they are difficult to model and to track visually. We study this problem, by using kinetic sand, a…

Humans are capable of continuously manipulating a wide variety of deformable objects into complex shapes. This is made possible by our intuitive understanding of material properties and mechanics of the object, for reasoning about object…

Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark of human cognition, tool use in…

Autonomous fabric manipulation is a longstanding challenge in robotics, but evaluating progress is difficult due to the cost and diversity of robot hardware. Using Reach, a cloud robotics platform that enables low-latency remote execution…

Deformable object manipulation presents a unique set of challenges in robotic manipulation by exhibiting high degrees of freedom and severe self-occlusion. State representation for materials that exhibit plastic behavior, like modeling clay…

We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational, but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role…

Both, robot and hand-eye calibration haven been object to research for decades. While current approaches manage to precisely and robustly identify the parameters of a robot's kinematic model, they still rely on external devices, such as…

Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…

The pattern formation task is commonly seen in a multi-robot system. In this paper, we study the problem of forming complex shapes with functionally limited mobile robots, which have to rely on other robots to precisely locate themselves.…

Deformable object manipulation remains a key challenge in developing autonomous robotic systems that can be successfully deployed in real-world scenarios. In this work, we explore the challenges of deformable object manipulation through the…

Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…