Related papers: Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping …
We propose a method to estimate the mechanical parameters of fabrics using a casual capture setup with a depth camera. Our approach enables to create mechanically-correct digital representations of real-world textile materials, which is a…
Pneumatic soft everting robotic structures have the potential to facilitate human transfer tasks due to their ability to grow underneath humans without sliding friction and their utility as a flexible sling when deflated. Tubular structures…
There is a great demand for the robotization of manufacturing processes fea-turing monotonous labor. Some manufacturing tasks requiring specific skills (welding, painting, etc.) suffer from a lack of workers. Robots have been used in these…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…
We present a robotic system capable of navigating autonomously by following a line and taking good quality pictures of people. When a group of people are detected, the robot rotates towards them and then back to line while continuously…
This paper develops a flexible and robust robotic system for autonomous drawing on 3D surfaces. The system takes 2D drawing strokes and a 3D target surface (mesh or point clouds) as input. It maps the 2D strokes onto the 3D surface and…
Pneumatic soft robots present many advantages in manipulation tasks. Notably, their inherent compliance makes them safe and reliable in unstructured and fragile environments. However, full-body shape sensing for pneumatic soft robots is…
Foundation models are rapidly improving the capability of robots in performing everyday tasks autonomously such as meal preparation, yet robots will still need to be instructed by humans due to model performance, the difficulty of capturing…
Training general-purpose robots requires learning from large and diverse data sources. Current approaches rely heavily on teleoperated demonstrations which are difficult to scale. We present a scalable framework for training manipulation…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Vertebrate animals benefit from a combination of rigidity for structural support and softness for adaptation. Similarly, integrating rigidity and softness can enhance the versatility of soft robotics. However, the challenges associated with…
Cutting is a common form of manipulation when working with divisible objects such as food, rope, or clay. Cooking in particular relies heavily on cutting to divide food items into desired shapes. However, cutting food is a challenging task…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
One of the challenges of full autonomy is to have a robot capable of manipulating its current environment to achieve another environment configuration. This paper is a step towards this challenge, focusing on the visual understanding of the…
Soft robotics technology can aid in achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement through development of autonomous, environmentally responsible machines powered by renewable energy. By…
Many applications in robotics require primitive spherical geometry, especially in cases where efficient distance queries are necessary. Manual creation of spherical models is time-consuming and prone to errors. This paper presents Foam, a…
The field of robotics faces inherent challenges in manipulating deformable objects, particularly in understanding and standardising fabric properties like elasticity, stiffness, and friction. While the significance of these properties is…
Modeling and manipulating elasto-plastic objects are essential capabilities for robots to perform complex industrial and household interaction tasks (e.g., stuffing dumplings, rolling sushi, and making pottery). However, due to the high…
A critical bottleneck hindering further advancement in embodied AI and robotics is the challenge of scaling robot data. To address this, the field of learning robot manipulation skills from human video data has attracted rapidly growing…