Related papers: Intersection-free Robot Manipulation with Soft-Rig…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…
Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…
Grasping is fundamental to robotic manipulation, and recent advances in large-scale grasping datasets have provided essential training data and evaluation benchmarks, accelerating the development of learning-based methods for robust object…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
While rigid robots are extensively used in various applications, they are limited in the tasks they can perform and can be unsafe in close human-robot interactions. Soft robots on the other hand surpass the capabilities of rigid robots in…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
In this paper, we present a framework that unites obstacle avoidance and deliberate physical interaction for robotic manipulators. As humans and robots begin to coexist in work and household environments, pure collision avoidance is…
Many industries extensively use flexible materials. Effective approaches for handling flexible objects with a robot manipulator must address residual vibrations. Existing solutions rely on complex models, use additional instrumentation for…
Recent advancements in robot tool use have unlocked their usage for novel tasks, yet the predominant focus is on rigid-body tools, while the investigation of soft-body tools and their dynamic interaction with rigid bodies remains…
Accurately simulating whether an object will be lifted securely or dropped during grasping is a longstanding Sim2Real challenge. Soft compliant jaw tips are almost universally used with parallel-jaw robot grippers due to their ability to…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
Intrinsically elastic robots surpass their rigid counterparts in a range of different characteristics. By temporarily storing potential energy and subsequently converting it to kinetic energy, elastic robots are capable of highly dynamic…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
With soft robotics being increasingly employed in settings demanding high and controlled contact forces, recent research has demonstrated the use of soft robots to estimate or intrinsically sense forces without requiring external sensing…