Related papers: Object manipulation through contact configuration …
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…
To determine if a skill can be executed in any given environment, a robot needs to learn the preconditions for the skill. As robots begin to operate in dynamic and unstructured environments, precondition models will need to generalize to…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…
Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free…
Optimal estimation is a promising tool for estimation of payloads' inertial parameters and localization of robots in the presence of multiple contacts. To harness its advantages in robotics, it is crucial to solve these large and…
This paper addresses the problem of position- and orientation-based formation control of a class of second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in a $3$D workspace with obstacles. More specifically, we design a decentralized control protocol…
Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of grasping novel objects in unstructured environments. To address this problem, consideration of the object geometry, reachability and force closure analysis are required. We propose a framework…
In this paper, we present a general learning-based framework to automatically visual-servo control the position and shape of a deformable object with unknown deformation parameters. The servo-control is accomplished by learning a feedback…
The hybrid nature of multi-contact robotic systems, due to making and breaking contact with the environment, creates significant challenges for high-quality control. Existing model-based methods typically rely on either good prior knowledge…
Humans learn about objects via interaction and using multiple perceptions, such as vision, sound, and touch. While vision can provide information about an object's appearance, non-visual sensors, such as audio and haptics, can provide…
Pushing is an essential non-prehensile manipulation skill used for tasks ranging from pre-grasp manipulation to scene rearrangement, reasoning about object relations in the scene, and thus pushing actions have been widely studied in…
Contact-rich manipulation requires reliable estimation of extrinsic contacts-the interactions between a grasped object and its environment which provide essential contextual information for planning, control, and policy learning. However,…
Learning predictive models from interaction with the world allows an agent, such as a robot, to learn about how the world works, and then use this learned model to plan coordinated sequences of actions to bring about desired outcomes.…
A significant barrier preventing model-based methods from achieving real-time and versatile dexterous robotic manipulation is the inherent complexity of multi-contact dynamics. Traditionally formulated as complementarity models,…
This work establishes a solution to the problem of assessing the capacity of multi-object assemblies to withstand external forces without becoming unstable. Our physically-grounded approach handles arbitrary structures made from rigid…
This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the…
When we physically interact with our environment using our hands, we touch objects and force them to move: contact and motion are defining properties of manipulation. In this paper, we present an active, bottom-up method for the detection…
In previous work, we introduced a method for modeling a configuration of objects in 2D and 3D images using a mathematical "medial/skeletal linking structure." In this paper, we show how these structures allow us to capture positional…