Related papers: Precise Well-plate Placing Utilizing Contact Durin…

Pose estimation systems are used in a variety of fields, from sports analytics to livestock care. Given their potential impact, it is paramount to systematically test their behaviour and potential for failure. This is a complex task due to…

The work in this paper is motivated by the increasing use of electrical and electromagnetic methods in geoscience problems where steel-cased wells are present. Applications of interest include monitoring carbon capture and storage and…

We demonstrate a method to accurately control the distance between a custom probe and a sample on a {\mu}m to nm scale. The method relies on the closed-loop feedback on the angular deflection of an in-contact AFM microcantilever. High…

Self-touch gestures (e.g., nuanced facial touches and subtle finger scratches) provide rich insights into human behaviors, from hygiene practices to health monitoring. However, existing approaches fall short in detecting such micro gestures…

Calibration of fixtures in robotic work cells is essential but also time consuming and error-prone, and poor calibration can easily lead to wasted debugging time in downstream tasks. Contact-based calibration methods let the user measure…

The precise tracking of micron sized colloidal particles - held in the vicinity of each other using optical tweezers - is an elegant way to gain information about the particle-particle pair interaction potential. The accuracy of the method,…

Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) is an established technique providing very accurate position measurements of satellites in Earth orbit. However, despite decades of development, it remains a complex and expensive technology, which impedes its…

Using optical tweezers and a haptic device, microspheres having diameters ranging from 3 to 4 um (floating in a fluid solution) are manipulated in order to form patterns of coupled optical microresonators by assembling the spheres via…

Rotational displacement about the grasping point is a common grasp failure when an object is grasped at a location away from its center of gravity. Tactile sensors with soft surfaces, such as GelSight sensors, can detect the rotation…

Electrowetting is a commonly used tool to manipulate sessile drops on hydrophobic surfaces. By applying an external voltage over a liquid and a dielectric-coated surface, one achieves a reduction of the macroscopic contact angles for…

Accurate knowledge of object poses is crucial to successful robotic manipulation tasks, and yet most current approaches only work in laboratory settings. Noisy sensors and cluttered scenes interfere with accurate pose recognition, which is…

Estimating the location of contact is a primary function of artificial tactile sensing apparatuses that perceive the environment through touch. Existing contact localization methods use flat geometry and uniform sensor distributions as a…

Stable and reliable grasp is critical to robotic manipulations especially for fragile and glazed objects, where the grasp force requires precise control as too large force possibly damages the objects while small force leads to slip and…

Relative placement tasks are an important category of tasks in which one object needs to be placed in a desired pose relative to another object. Previous work has shown success in learning relative placement tasks from just a small number…

Contact angle is an essential physical quantity that characterizes the wettability of a substrate. Although it is widely used in the studies of surface wetting, capillary phenomena and moving contact lines, measuring contact angles in…

Perceiving the environment through touch is important for robots to reach in cluttered environments, but devising a way to sense without disturbing objects is challenging. This work presents the design and modelling of whisker-inspired…

Handling fragile objects remains a major challenge for robotic manipulation. Tactile sensing and soft robotics can improve delicate object handling, but typically involve high integration complexity or slow response times. We address these…

An instrument has been developed for precision controlled exposures of electronic devices and material samples in particle beams. The instrument provides simultaneously a real time record of the profile of the beam and the fluence received.…

We propose a novel formulation of robotic pick and place as a deep reinforcement learning (RL) problem. Whereas most deep RL approaches to robotic manipulation frame the problem in terms of low level states and actions, we propose a more…

Postural sway assessment is important for detecting balance problems and identifying people at risk of falls. Force plates (FP) are considered the gold standard postural sway assessment method in laboratory conditions, but their lack of…