Related papers: Robotic surface exploration with vision and tactil…
Safety-critical infrastructures, such as bridges, are periodically inspected to check for existing damage, such as fatigue cracks and corrosion, and to guarantee the safe use of the infrastructure. Visual inspection is the most frequent…
Crack detection is of great significance for monitoring the integrity and well-being of the infrastructure such as bridges and underground pipelines, which are harsh environments for people to access. In recent years, computer vision…
Surface cracks are a very common indicator of potential structural faults. Their early detection and monitoring is an important factor in structural health monitoring. Left untreated, they can grow in size over time and require expensive…
Surface cracks in infrastructure can lead to severe deterioration and expensive maintenance if not efficiently repaired. Manual repair methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and imprecise. While advancements in robotic perception and…
The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information…
Conventional wheeled robots are unable to traverse scientifically interesting, but dangerous, cave environments. Multi-limbed climbing robot designs, such as ReachBot, are able to grasp irregular surface features and execute climbing…
General robot manipulation requires the handling of previously unseen objects. Learning a physically accurate model at test time can provide significant benefits in data efficiency, predictability, and reuse between tasks. Tactile sensing…
This paper addresses the problem of simultaneously exploring an unknown object to model its shape, using tactile sensors on robotic fingers, while also improving finger placement to optimise grasp stability. In many situations, a robot will…
Crack is one of the most common road distresses which may pose road safety hazards. Generally, crack detection is performed by either certified inspectors or structural engineers. This task is, however, time-consuming, subjective and…
Autonomous robotic inspection, where a robot moves through its environment and inspects points of interest, has applications in industrial settings, structural health monitoring, and medicine. Planning the paths for a robot to safely and…
In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the…
A physics-informed machine learning framework based on holomorphic neural networks is introduced for detecting cracks in two-dimensional solids from strain or displacement data. Crack detection is formulated as an inverse problem in which…
Rockfalls are a hazard for the safety of infrastructure as well as people. Identifying loose rocks by inspection of slopes adjacent to roadways and other infrastructure and removing them in advance can be an effective way to prevent…
Inspired by humans' ability to perceive the surface texture of unfamiliar objects without relying on vision, the sense of touch can play a crucial role in robots exploring the environment, particularly in scenes where vision is difficult to…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…
We present a simultaneous sensor-based inspection and footprint coverage (SIFC) planning and control design with applications to autonomous robotic crack mapping and filling. The main challenge of the SIFC problem lies in the coupling of…
Picking up transparent objects is still a challenging task for robots. The visual properties of transparent objects such as reflection and refraction make the current grasping methods that rely on camera sensing fail to detect and localise…
In this work, we develop an approach for guiding robots to automatically localize and find the shapes of tumors and other stiff inclusions present in the anatomy. Our approach uses Gaussian processes to model the stiffness distribution and…
Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…