Related papers: Object manipulation through contact configuration …
Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel…
Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…
This paper presents a contact-implicit model predictive control (MPC) framework for the real-time discovery of multi-contact motions, without predefined contact mode sequences or foothold positions. This approach utilizes the…
In the context of mobile navigation in unstructured environments, the predominant approach entails the avoidance of obstacles. The prevailing path planning algorithms are contingent upon deviating from the intended path for an indefinite…
Interactive perception enables robots to manipulate the environment and objects to bring them into states that benefit the perception process. Deformable objects pose challenges to this due to significant manipulation difficulty and…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
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…
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…
Robotic tasks which involve uncertainty--due to variation in goal, environment configuration, or confidence in task model--may require human input to instruct or adapt the robot. In tasks with physical contact, several existing methods for…
A kitchen assistant needs to operate human-scale objects, such as cabinets and ovens, in unmapped environments with dynamic obstacles. Autonomous interactions in such environments require integrating dexterous manipulation and fluid…
Inferring physical properties can significantly enhance robotic manipulation by enabling robots to handle objects safely and efficiently through adaptive grasping strategies. Previous approaches have typically relied on either tactile or…
Robots need to manipulate objects in constrained environments like shelves and cabinets when assisting humans in everyday settings like homes and offices. These constraints make manipulation difficult by reducing grasp accessibility, so…
This paper is concerned with learning transferable forward models for push manipulation that can be applying to novel contexts and how to improve the quality of prediction when critical information is available. We propose to learn a…
Haptic interaction is essential for the dynamic dexterity of animals, which seamlessly switch from an impedance to an admittance behaviour using the force feedback from their proprioception. However, this ability is extremely challenging to…
In this paper, we present an approach for generating a variety of whole-body motions for a humanoid robot. We extend the available Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches for walking on flat terrain to plan for both vertical motion of the…
Generalizable manipulation involving cross-type object interactions is a critical yet challenging capability in robotics. To reliably accomplish such tasks, robots must address two fundamental challenges: "where to manipulate" (contact…
Inertial parameters characterise an object's motion under applied forces, and can provide strong priors for planning and control of robotic actions to manipulate the object. However, these parameters are not available a-priori in situations…
Grasping objects under uncertainty remains an open problem in robotics research. This uncertainty is often due to noisy or partial observations of the object pose or shape. To enable a robot to react appropriately to unforeseen effects, it…
Manipulation planning is the task of computing robot trajectories that move a set of objects to their target configuration while satisfying physically feasibility. In contrast to existing works that assume known object templates, we are…
Manipulating elasto-plastic objects remains a significant challenge due to severe self-occlusion, difficulties of representation, and complicated dynamics. This work proposes a novel framework for elasto-plastic object manipulation with a…