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One of the first tasks we learn as children is to grasp objects based on our tactile perception. Incorporating such skill in robots will enable multiple applications, such as increasing flexibility in industrial processes or providing…

Surgical procedures require a high level of technical skill to ensure efficiency and patient safety. Due to the direct effect of surgeon skill on patient outcomes, the development of cost-effective and realistic training methods is…

Robot skills systems are meant to reduce robot setup time for new manufacturing tasks. Yet, for dexterous, contact-rich tasks, it is often difficult to find the right skill parameters. One strategy is to learn these parameters by allowing…

Goal: A limitation in robotic surgery is the lack of force feedback, due to challenges in suitable sensing techniques. To enhance the perception of the surgeons and precise force rendering, estimation of these forces along with tissue…

Robots deployed in many real-world settings need to be able to acquire new skills and solve new tasks over time. Prior works on planning with skills often make assumptions on the structure of skills and tasks, such as subgoal skills, shared…

Miniaturized instruments are highly needed for robot assisted medical healthcare and treatment, especially for less invasive surgery as it empowers more flexible access to restricted anatomic intervention. But the robotic design is more…

One promising approach towards effective robot decision making in complex, long-horizon tasks is to sequence together parameterized skills. We consider a setting where a robot is initially equipped with (1) a library of parameterized…

Microrobotics is an attractive area of research as small-scale robots have the potential to improve the precision and dexterity offered by minimally invasive surgeries. One example of such a tool is a pair of micro-surgical scissors that…

Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…

In the domain of assistive robotics, the significance of effective modeling is well acknowledged. Prior research has primarily focused on enhancing model accuracy or involved the collection of extensive, often impractical amounts of data.…

This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…

Diagnostic activities, such as ultrasound scans and palpation, are relatively low-cost. They play a crucial role in the early detection of health problems and in assessing their progression. However, they are also error-prone activities,…

Body posture influences human and robots performance in manipulation tasks, as appropriate poses facilitate motion or force exertion along different axes. In robotics, manipulability ellipsoids arise as a powerful descriptor to analyze,…

Soft robots have high adaptability and safeness which are derived from their softness, and therefore it is paid attention to use them in human society. However, the controllability of soft robots is not enough to perform dexterous behaviors…

We introduce a method for constructing skills capable of solving tasks drawn from a distribution of parameterized reinforcement learning problems. The method draws example tasks from a distribution of interest and uses the corresponding…

We address the problem of effectively composing skills to solve sparse-reward tasks in the real world. Given a set of parameterized skills (such as exerting a force or doing a top grasp at a location), our goal is to learn policies that…

Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…

Surgical skill directly affects surgical procedure outcomes; thus, effective training is needed to ensure satisfactory results. Many objective assessment metrics have been developed and some are widely used in surgical training simulators.…

Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…

When faced with an execution failure, an intelligent robot should be able to identify the likely reasons for the failure and adapt its execution policy accordingly. This paper addresses the question of how to utilise knowledge about the…