Related papers: Touch if it's transparent! ACTOR: Active Tactile-b…
We study the problem of object retrieval in scenarios where visual sensing is absent, object shapes are unknown beforehand and objects can move freely, like grabbing objects out of a drawer. Successful solutions require localizing free…
Humans represent and discriminate the objects in the same category using their properties, and an intelligent robot should be able to do the same. In this paper, we build a robot system that can autonomously perceive the object properties…
We propose Observer Actor (ObAct), a novel framework for active vision imitation learning in which the observer moves to optimal visual observations for the actor. We study ObAct on a dual-arm robotic system equipped with wrist-mounted…
Optical tactile sensors play a pivotal role in robot perception and manipulation tasks. The membrane of these sensors can be painted with markers or remain markerless, enabling them to function in either marker or markerless mode. However,…
Recovering the 3D shape of transparent objects using a small number of unconstrained natural images is an ill-posed problem. Complex light paths induced by refraction and reflection have prevented both traditional and deep multiview stereo…
Object insertion is a classic contact-rich manipulation task. The task remains challenging, especially when considering general objects of unknown geometry, which significantly limits the ability to understand the contact configuration…
Appearance-based generic object recognition is a challenging problem because all possible appearances of objects cannot be registered, especially as new objects are produced every day. Function of objects, however, has a comparatively small…
In many real-world visual Imitation Learning (IL) scenarios, there is a misalignment between the agent's and the expert's perspectives, which might lead to the failure of imitation. Previous methods have generally solved this problem by…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
Category-level object pose and shape estimation from a single depth image has recently drawn research attention due to its potential utility for tasks such as robotics manipulation. The task is particularly challenging because the three…
In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…
Recently, Transformer-based image restoration networks have achieved promising improvements over convolutional neural networks due to parameter-independent global interactions. To lower computational cost, existing works generally limit…
Recently simulation methods have been developed for optical tactile sensors to enable the Sim2Real learning, i.e., firstly training models in simulation before deploying them on the real robot. However, some artefacts in the real objects…
The sense of touch is fundamental to human dexterity. When mimicked in robotic touch, particularly by use of soft optical tactile sensors, it suffers from distortion due to motion-dependent shear. This complicates tactile tasks like shape…
Humans have exceptional tactile sensing capabilities, which they can leverage to solve challenging, partially observable tasks that cannot be solved from visual observation alone. Research in tactile sensing attempts to unlock this new…
Robotic manipulation in industrial scenarios such as construction commonly faces uncertain observations in which the state of the manipulating object may not be accurately captured due to occlusions and partial observables. For example,…
Tactile sensing is vital for human dexterous manipulation, however, it has not been widely used in robotics. Compact, low-cost sensing platforms can facilitate a change, but unlike their popular optical counterparts, they are difficult to…
Haptic exploration is a key skill for both robots and humans to discriminate and handle unknown objects or to recognize familiar objects. Its active nature is evident in humans who from early on reliably acquire sophisticated sensory-motor…
Precise perception of articulated objects is vital for empowering service robots. Recent studies mainly focus on point cloud, a single-modal approach, often neglecting vital texture and lighting details and assuming ideal conditions like…
Humans leverage multiple sensor modalities when interacting with objects and discovering their intrinsic properties. Using the visual modality alone is insufficient for deriving intuition behind object properties (e.g., which of two boxes…