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Tactile perception is central to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. However, it requires contact, and a mature implementation must infer object models while also accounting for the motion induced by the interaction. In this…
Context.Within the sequential accretion scenario of planet formation, planets are build up through a sequence sticking collisions. The outcome of collisions between porous dust aggregates is very important for the growth from very small…
We describe size-varying cylindrical particles made from silicone elastomers that can serve as building blocks for robotic granular materials. The particle size variation, which is achieved by inflation, gives rise to changes in stiffness…
In this work, we present a method to estimate the mass distribution of a rigid object through robotic interactions and tactile feedback. This is a challenging problem because of the complexity of physical dynamics modeling and the action…
Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…
The potential of large tactile arrays to improve robot perception for safe operation in human-dominated environments and of high-resolution tactile arrays to enable human-level dexterous manipulation is well accepted. However, the increase…
Thin plastic bags are ubiquitous in retail stores, healthcare, food handling, recycling, homes, and school lunchrooms. They are challenging both for perception (due to specularities and occlusions) and for manipulation (due to the dynamics…
Interparticle cohesion is prevalent in stored powders, geological formations, and infrastructure engineering, yet a comprehensive understanding of the effects of its micro-mechanics on bulk properties has not been established…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
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…
This paper explores active sensing strategies that employ vision-based tactile sensors for robotic perception and classification of fabric textures. We formalize the active sampling problem in the context of tactile fabric recognition and…
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…
Tactile sensing is inherently contact based. To use tactile data, robots need to make contact with the surface of an object. This is inefficient in applications where an agent needs to make a decision between multiple alternatives that…
Robotic manipulation can benefit from wrist-mounted force/torque (F/T) sensors, but conventional F/T sensors can be expensive, difficult to install, and damaged by high loads. We present Visual Force/Torque Sensing (VFTS), a method that…
Our brains are able to exploit coarse physical models of fluids to solve everyday manipulation tasks. There has been considerable interest in developing such a capability in robots so that they can autonomously manipulate fluids adapting to…
Throughout our history, we, humans, have sought to better control and understand our environment. To this end, we have extended our natural senses with a host of sensors-tools that enable us to detect both the very large, such as the…
A voxelization based post-processing algorithm is proposed to analyze the packing of non-spherical particle assemblies simulated using the Discrete Element Method. Voxelization of the particle data allows for isolating the geometric…
Sediment transport is studied as a function of the grain to fluid density ratio using two phase numerical sim- ulations based on a discrete element method (DEM) for particles coupled to a continuum Reynolds averaged description of…
Tactile sensing is important for robots to perceive the world as it captures the texture and hardness of the object in contact and is robust to illumination and colour variances. However, due to the limited sensing area and the resistance…
In this paper, we perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to study the two-dimensional packing process of both monosized and random size particles with radii ranging from $1.0 \, \mu m$ to $7.0 \, \mu m$. The system was allowed to…