Related papers: AcTExplore: Active Tactile Exploration of Unknown …
Many-legged elongated robots show promise for reliable mobility on rugged landscapes. However, most studies on these systems focus on planar motion planning without addressing rapid vertical motion. Despite their success on mild rugged…
Exploration in an unknown environment is the core functionality for mobile robots. Learning-based exploration methods, including convolutional neural networks, provide excellent strategies without human-designed logic for the feature…
The potential of large tactile arrays to improve robot perception for safe operation in human-dominated environments and of high-resolution tactile arrays to enable human-level dexterous manipulation is well accepted. However, the increase…
Perceiving accurate 3D object shape is important for robots to interact with the physical world. Current research along this direction has been primarily relying on visual observations. Vision, however useful, has inherent limitations due…
Multi-view implicit scene reconstruction methods have become increasingly popular due to their ability to represent complex scene details. Recent efforts have been devoted to improving the representation of input information and to reducing…
Perception using whisker-inspired tactile sensors currently faces a major challenge: the lack of active control in robots based on direct contact information from the whisker. To accurately reconstruct object contours, it is crucial for the…
We are witnessing significant progress on perception models, specifically those trained on large-scale internet images. However, efficiently generalizing these perception models to unseen embodied tasks is insufficiently studied, which will…
The importance of force perception in interacting with the environment was proven years ago. However, it is still a challenge to measure the contact force distribution accurately in real-time. In order to break through this predicament, we…
Robotic tactile sensing provides a method of recognizing objects and their properties where vision fails. Prior work on tactile perception in robotic manipulation has frequently focused on exploratory procedures (EPs). However, the…
Actions as simple as grasping an object or navigating around it require a rich understanding of that object's 3D shape from a given viewpoint. In this paper we repurpose powerful learning machinery, originally developed for object…
Tactile sensing is crucial for achieving human-level robotic capabilities in manipulation tasks. As a promising solution, Vision-Based Tactile Sensors (VBTSs) offer high spatial resolution and cost-effectiveness, but present unique…
We propose DeepExplorer, a simple and lightweight metric-free exploration method for topological mapping of unknown environments. It performs task and motion planning (TAMP) entirely in image feature space. The task planner is a recurrent…
High-resolution (HR) contact surface information is essential for robotic grasping and precise manipulation tasks. However, it remains a challenge for current taxel-based sensors to obtain HR tactile information. In this paper, we focus on…
Touch and vision go hand in hand, mutually enhancing our ability to understand the world. From a research perspective, the problem of mixing touch and vision is underexplored and presents interesting challenges. To this end, we propose…
Mobile robots exploring indoor environments increasingly rely on vision-language models to perceive high-level semantic cues in camera images, such as object categories. Such models offer the potential to substantially advance robot…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
The mechanisms of infant development are far from understood. Learning about one's own body is likely a foundation for subsequent development. Here we look specifically at the problem of how spontaneous touches to the body in early infancy…
Active perception is a fundamental skill that enables us humans to deal with uncertainty in our inherently partially observable environment. For senses such as touch, where the information is sparse and local, active perception becomes…
Our sense of touch is essential and permeates in interactions involving natural explorations and affective communications. For instance, we routinely judge the ripeness of fruit at the grocery store, caress the arm of a spouse to offer…
Modern incarnations of tactile sensors produce high-dimensional raw sensory feedback such as images, making it challenging to efficiently store, process, and generalize across sensors. To address these concerns, we introduce a novel…