Related papers: RoboCook: Long-Horizon Elasto-Plastic Object Manip…
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…
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…
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…
Assistive robot arms enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. These arms are dexterous and high-dimensional; however, the interfaces people must use to control their robots are low-dimensional. Consider…
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…
Manipulation of elastoplastic objects like dough often involves topological changes such as splitting and merging. The ability to accurately predict these topological changes that a specific action might incur is critical for planning…
Complex object manipulation tasks often span over long sequences of operations. Task planning over long-time horizons is a challenging and open problem in robotics, and its complexity grows exponentially with an increasing number of…
A key challenge in robotic food manipulation is modeling the material properties of diverse and deformable food items. We propose using a multimodal sensory approach to interact and play with food that facilitates the ability to distinguish…
Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…
Chopsticks constitute a simple yet versatile tool that humans have used for thousands of years to perform a variety of challenging tasks ranging from food manipulation to surgery. Applying such a simple tool in a diverse repertoire of…
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…
Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…
Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping depth images? The short answer is no: current day robots can't. In this article, we address the problem of shaping plastic material with an anthropomorphic arm/hand robot, which observes the…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
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…
The robotic handling of compliant and deformable food raw materials, characterized by high biological variation, complex geometrical 3D shapes, and mechanical structures and texture, is currently in huge demand in the ocean space,…
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…
This paper introduces RoTipBot, a novel robotic system for handling thin, flexible objects. Different from previous works that are limited to singulating them using suction cups or soft grippers, RoTipBot can count multiple layers and then…
Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…
The progressive prevalence of robots in human-suited environments has given rise to a myriad of object manipulation techniques, in which dexterity plays a paramount role. It is well-established that humans exhibit extraordinary dexterity…