Related papers: Real-to-Sim Deformable Object Manipulation: Optimi…
Surgical scene simulation plays a crucial role in surgical education and simulator-based robot learning. Traditional approaches for creating these environments with surgical scene involve a labor-intensive process where designers hand-craft…
Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…
Manipulating deformable objects, such as ropes and clothing, is a long-standing challenge in robotics, because of their large degrees of freedom, complex non-linear dynamics, and self-occlusion in visual perception. The key difficulty is a…
Robotic manipulation of deformable 1D objects such as ropes, cables, and hoses is challenging due to the lack of high-fidelity analytic models and large configuration spaces. Furthermore, learning end-to-end manipulation policies directly…
Dynamic reconstruction of deformable tissues in endoscopic video is a key technology for robot-assisted surgery. Recent reconstruction methods based on neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have achieved remarkable results in the reconstruction of…
Deformable objects manipulation can benefit from representations that seamlessly integrate vision and touch while handling occlusions. In this work, we present a novel approach for, and real-world demonstration of, multimodal visuo-tactile…
In sim-to-real Reinforcement Learning (RL), a policy is trained in a simulated environment and then deployed on the physical system. The main challenge of sim-to-real RL is to overcome the reality gap - the discrepancies between the real…
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects (e.g., fruits/vegetables, internal organs, bottles/boxes) is critical for real-world applications such as food processing, robotic surgery, and household automation. However, developing grasp…
Deformable object manipulation remains a key challenge in developing autonomous robotic systems that can be successfully deployed in real-world scenarios. In this work, we explore the challenges of deformable object manipulation through the…
Laparoscopic Field of View (FOV) control is one of the most fundamental and important components in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), nevertheless, the traditional manual holding paradigm may easily bring fatigue to surgical assistants, and…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
Visual actionable affordance has emerged as a transformative approach in robotics, focusing on perceiving interaction areas prior to manipulation. Traditional methods rely on pixel sampling to identify successful interaction samples or…
Purpose: Delineating tumor boundaries during breast-conserving surgery is challenging as tumors are often highly mobile, non-palpable, and have irregularly shaped borders. To address these challenges, we introduce a cooperative robotic…
Endoluminal surgery offers a minimally invasive option for early-stage gastrointestinal and urinary tract cancers but is limited by surgical tools and a steep learning curve. Robotic systems, particularly continuum robots, provide flexible…
Reduced-order simulation is an emerging method for accelerating physical simulations with high DOFs, and recently developed neural-network-based methods with nonlinear subspaces have been proven effective in diverse applications as more…
This paper presents a method for constrained motion planning from vision, which enables a robot to move its end-effector over an observed surface, given start and destination points. The robot has no prior knowledge of the surface shape,…
We present a novel formulation for mesh-free, reduced-order simulation of deformable hyperelastic objects. Existing work in reduced-order elastodynamic simulation represents the input geometry by either meshes, which can be difficult to…