Related papers: Embracing Safe Contacts with Contact-aware Plannin…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown a strong capability in enabling robots to execute general instructions, yet they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks, where success requires precise alignment, stable contact…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…
The increasing demand for accelerated scientific discovery, driven by global challenges, highlights the need for advanced AI-driven robotics. Deploying robotic chemists in human-centric labs is key for the next horizon of autonomous…
In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC) that accomplishes interactive robotic tasks, in which multiple contacts may occur at unknown locations. To address such scenarios, we made an explicit contact feedback loop in the…
The automation of warehouse operations is crucial for improving productivity and reducing human exposure to hazardous environments. One operation frequently performed in warehouses is bin-packing where items need to be placed into…
Multiple levels of safety measures are required by multiple interaction modes which collaborative robots need to perform industrial tasks with human co-workers. We develop three independent modules to account for safety in different types…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…
As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…
Despite recent progress in general purpose robotics, robot policies still lag far behind basic human capabilities in the real world. Humans interact constantly with the physical world, yet this rich data resource remains largely untapped in…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
We present a contact-implicit trajectory optimization framework that can plan contact-interaction trajectories for different robot architectures and tasks using a trivial initial guess and without requiring any parameter tuning. This is…
Daily tasks require us to use our whole body to manipulate objects, for instance when our hands are unavailable. We consider the issue of providing humanoid robots with the ability to autonomously perform similar whole-body manipulation…
Contact modeling plays a central role in motion planning, simulation, and control of legged robots, as legged locomotion is realized through contact. The two prevailing approaches to model the contact consider rigid and compliant premise at…
As robots operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, fast motion re-planning has become a widely explored area of research. In a real-world deployment, we often lack the ability to fully observe the environment at all times,…
Collaborative robots became a popular tool for increasing productivity in partly automated manufacturing plants. Intuitive robot teaching methods are required to quickly and flexibly adapt the robot programs to new tasks. Gestures have an…
Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…
Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
This paper uses a mobile manipulator with a collaborative robotic arm to manipulate objects beyond the robot's maximum payload. It proposes a single-shot probabilistic roadmap-based method to plan and optimize manipulation motion with…
Robots operating in unstructured environments face significant challenges when interacting with everyday objects like doors. They particularly struggle to generalize across diverse door types and conditions. Existing vision-based and…