Related papers: Autonomous Robotic Arm Manipulation for Planetary …

Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) and causal modelling naturally complement each other. The goal of causal modelling is to predict the effects of interventions in an environment, while the goal of reinforcement learning is to select interventions…

Robots capable of performing manipulation tasks in a broad range of missions in unstructured environments can develop numerous applications to impact and enhance human life. Existing work in robot learning has shown success in applying…

The effectiveness of model training heavily relies on the quality of available training resources. However, budget constraints often impose limitations on data collection efforts. To tackle this challenge, we introduce causal exploration in…

A particular type of assistive robots designed for physical interaction with objects could play an important role assisting with mobility and fall prevention in healthcare facilities. Autonomous mobile manipulation presents a hurdle prior…

Using robots for automating tasks in environments shared with humans, such as warehouses, shopping centres, or hospitals, requires these robots to comprehend the fundamental physical interactions among nearby agents and objects.…

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.…

Precision is a crucial performance indicator for robot arms, as high precision manipulation allows for a wider range of applications. Traditional methods for improving robot arm precision rely on error compensation. However, these methods…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents are able to learn contact-rich manipulation tasks by maximizing a reward signal, but require large amounts of experience, especially in environments with many obstacles that complicate exploration. In…

Prevalent theories in cognitive science propose that humans understand and represent the knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In making sense of the world, we build causal models in our mind to encode cause-effect relations…

Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…

We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…

Socially-aware robotic navigation is essential in environments where humans and robots coexist, ensuring both safety and comfort. However, most existing approaches have been primarily developed for mobile robots, leaving a significant gap…

Human-centered environments are rich with a wide variety of spatial relations between everyday objects. For autonomous robots to operate effectively in such environments, they should be able to reason about these relations and generalize…

Space exploration missions have seen use of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with ever more autonomy. Deep learning promises to take this even a step further, and has applications for high-level tasks, like path planning, as well…

Pushing objects through cluttered scenes is a challenging task, especially when the objects to be pushed have initially unknown dynamics and touching other entities has to be avoided to reduce the risk of damage. In this paper, we approach…

We address the problem of autonomous exploration and mapping for a mobile robot using visual inputs. Exploration and mapping is a well-known and key problem in robotics, the goal of which is to enable a robot to explore a new environment…

This work aims to learn how to perform complex robot manipulation tasks that are composed of several, consecutively executed low-level sub-tasks, given as input a few visual demonstrations of the tasks performed by a person. The sub-tasks…

A key challenge for robotic systems is to figure out the behavior of another agent. The capability to draw correct inferences is crucial to derive human behavior from examples. Processing correct inferences is especially challenging when…

This paper uses a mobile manipulator with a collaborative robotic arm to manipulate objects beyond the robot's maximum payload. It proposes a single-shot probabilistic roadmap-based method to plan and optimize manipulation motion with…