Related papers: Tactile Estimation of Extrinsic Contact Patch for …

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…

For humans, the process of grasping an object relies heavily on rich tactile feedback. Most recent robotic grasping work, however, has been based only on visual input, and thus cannot easily benefit from feedback after initiating contact.…

Ensuring stable object placement is crucial to prevent objects from toppling over, breaking, or causing spills. When an object makes initial contact to a surface, and some force is exerted, the moment of rotation caused by the instability…

Predicting the outcomes of robotic actions, often referred to as learning a world model, in complex environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual observations and action inputs to…

Pick-and-place is one of the fundamental tasks in robotics research. However, the attention has been mostly focused on the ``pick'' task, leaving the ``place'' task relatively unexplored. In this paper, we address the problem of placing…

We develop a real-time state estimation system to recover the pose and contact formation of an object relative to its environment. In this paper, we focus on the application of inserting an object picked by a suction cup into a tight space,…

Reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great success in solving different problems ranging from playing video games to robotics. However, they struggle to solve delicate robotic problems, especially those involving contact…

Robotic capacities in object manipulation are incomparable to those of humans. Besides years of learning, humans rely heavily on the richness of information from physical interaction with the environment. In particular, tactile sensing is…

During in-hand manipulation, robots must be able to continuously estimate the pose of the object in order to generate appropriate control actions. The performance of algorithms for pose estimation hinges on the robot's sensors being able to…

Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…

A long-standing question in robot hand design is how accurate tactile sensing must be. This paper uses simulated tactile signals and the reinforcement learning (RL) framework to study the sensing needs in grasping systems. Our first…

Robotic telemanipulation - the human-guided manipulation of remote objects - plays a pivotal role in several applications, from healthcare to operations in harsh environments. While visual feedback from cameras can provide valuable…

Current approaches to grasp planning for robotics demonstrate high success rates, but degrade with noisy sensors and other factors. Previous works have proposed tactile-based grasp stability classifiers to detect failures, but these…

Robust manipulation often hinges on a robot's ability to perceive extrinsic contacts-contacts between a grasped object and its surrounding environment. However, these contacts are difficult to observe through vision alone due to occlusions,…

Precise object manipulation and placement is a common problem for household robots, surgery robots, and robots working on in-situ construction. Prior work using computer vision, depth sensors, and reinforcement learning lacks the ability to…

We introduce a planner designed to guide robot manipulators in stably placing objects within intricate scenes. Our proposed method reverses the traditional approach to object placement: our planner selects contact points first and then…

To perform complex tasks, robots must be able to interact with and manipulate their surroundings. One of the key challenges in accomplishing this is robust state estimation during physical interactions, where the state involves not only the…

Humans rely on touch and tactile sensing for a lot of dexterous manipulation tasks. Our tactile sensing provides us with a lot of information regarding contact formations as well as geometric information about objects during any…

Tactile perception using vibration sensation helps robots recognize their environment's physical properties and perform complex tasks. A sliding motion is applied to target objects to generate tactile vibration data. However, situations…

Extrinsic manipulation, a technique that enables robots to leverage extrinsic resources for object manipulation, presents practical yet challenging scenarios. Particularly in the context of extrinsic manipulation on a supporting plane,…