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Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Many robotic tasks involving some form of 3D visual perception greatly benefit from a complete knowledge of the working environment. However, robots often have to tackle unstructured environments and their onboard visual sensors can only…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
Dynamic manipulation of flexible objects such as fabric, which is difficult to modelize, is one of the major challenges in robotics. With the development of deep learning, we are beginning to see results in simulations and in some actual…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) for robots has a wide range of applications in various fields such as industrial, service and health care sectors. However, compared to manipulation of rigid objects, DOM poses significant challenges for…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
The robotic manipulation of compliant objects is currently one of the most active problems in robotics due to its potential to automate many important applications. Despite the progress achieved by the robotics community in recent years,…
Accurate depth estimation remains an open problem for robotic manipulation; even state of the art techniques including structured light and LiDAR sensors fail on reflective or transparent surfaces. We address this problem by training a…
Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
Assistive robots should be able to wash, fold or iron clothes. However, due to the variety, deformability and self-occlusions of clothes, creating robot systems for cloth manipulation is challenging. Synthetic data is a promising direction…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare…
Autonomous mobile robots like self-flying drones and industrial robots heavily depend on depth images to perform tasks such as 3D reconstruction and visual SLAM. However, the presence of inaccuracies in these depth images can greatly hinder…
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…
Automating a robotic task, e.g., robotic suturing can be very complex and time-consuming. Learning a task model to autonomously perform the task is invaluable making the technology, robotic surgery, accessible for a wider community. The…
Large demand for robotics and automation has been reflected in the sanding works, as current manual operations are labor-intensive, without consistent quality, and also subject to safety and health issues. While several machines have been…
If robots could reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects, they could find applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance. Analytic models of elastic, 3D deformable objects require…
Clay sculpting is a nuanced, artistic task involving dexterous manipulation with long-horizon planning to achieve high-level goals. As a robotics problem, we formulate clay sculpting as a shape-to-shape matching challenge. Prior deformable…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
Fabric manipulation is a long-standing challenge in robotics due to the enormous state space and complex dynamics. Learning approaches stand out as promising for this domain as they allow us to learn behaviours directly from data. Most…