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Applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance require robots to reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects. Analytic models of elastic, 3D deformable objects require numerous…

Inspired by the octopus and other animals living in water, soft robots should naturally lend themselves to underwater operations, as supported by encouraging validations in deep water scenarios. This work deals with equipping soft arms with…

Shape-morphing devices, a crucial branch in soft robotics, hold significant application value in areas like human-machine interfaces, biomimetic robotics, and tools for interacting with biological systems. To achieve three-dimensional (3D)…

Soft robotic manipulators provide numerous advantages over conventional rigid manipulators in fragile environments such as the marine environment. However, developing analytic inverse models necessary for shape, motion, and force control of…

Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to…

Recognizing an object's material can inform a robot on the object's fragility or appropriate use. To estimate an object's material during manipulation, many prior works have explored the use of haptic sensing. In this paper, we explore a…

Deformable solid objects such as clay or dough are prevalent in industrial and home environments. However, robotic manipulation of such objects has largely remained unexplored in literature due to the high complexity involved in…

Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…

Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…

Technology has made navigation in 3D real time possible and this has made possible what seemed impossible. This paper explores the aspect of deep visual odometry methods for mobile robots. Visual odometry has been instrumental in making…

We consider the problem of robotic grasping using depth + RGB information sampling from a real sensor. we design an encoder-decoder neural network to predict grasp policy in real time. This method can fuse the advantage of depth image and…

Robotic manipulation of deformable objects is a difficult problem especially because of the complexity of the many different ways an object can deform. Searching such a high dimensional state space makes it difficult to recognize, track,…

A robot operating in a real-world environment needs to perform reasoning over a variety of sensor modalities such as vision, language and motion trajectories. However, it is extremely challenging to manually design features relating such…

Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…

Deformable object manipulation (DOM) with point clouds has great potential as non-rigid 3D shapes can be measured without detecting and tracking image features. However, robotic shape control of deformable objects with point clouds is…

In robotic surgery, pattern cutting through a deformable material is a challenging research field. The cutting procedure requires a robot to concurrently manipulate a scissor and a gripper to cut through a predefined contour trajectory on…

This paper presents a combined task and motion planner for a robot arm to carry out 3D metal wire curving tasks by collaborating with a bending machine. We assume a collaborative robot that is safe to work in a human environment but has a…

We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling approaches…

Object handover is a basic, but essential capability for robots interacting with humans in many applications, e.g., caring for the elderly and assisting workers in manufacturing workshops. It appears deceptively simple, as humans perform…

Applying micro-patterns to surfaces has been shown to impart useful physical properties such as drag reduction and hydrophobicity. However, current manufacturing techniques cannot produce micro-patterned surfaces at scale due to high-cost…