Related papers: Feel the Bite: Robot-Assisted Inside-Mouth Bite Tr…

We develop a real-time state estimation system to recover the pose and contact formation of an object relative to its environment. In this paper, we focus on the application of inserting an object picked by a suction cup into a tight space,…

Object handover is a common form of interaction that is widely present in collaborative tasks. However, achieving it efficiently remains a challenge. We address the problem of ensuring resilient robotic actions that can adapt to complex…

Robotic insertion tasks remain challenging due to uncertainties in perception and the need for precise control, particularly in unstructured environments. While humans seamlessly combine vision and touch for such tasks, effectively…

With the goal of increasing the speed and efficiency in robotic manipulation, a control approach is presented that aims to utilize intentional simultaneous impacts to its advantage. This approach exploits the concept of the time-invariant…

Human-robot object handover is a crucial element for assistive robots that aim to help people in their daily lives, including elderly care, hospitals, and factory floors. The existing approaches to solving these tasks rely on pre-selected…

To use robots in more unstructured environments, we have to accommodate for more complexities. Robotic systems need more awareness of the environment to adapt to uncertainty and variability. Although cameras have been predominantly used in…

This paper presents a control interface to translate the residual body motions of individuals living with severe disabilities, into control commands for body-machine interaction. A custom, wireless, wearable multi-sensor network is used to…

Humans' ability to smoothly switch between locomotion and manipulation is a remarkable feature of sensorimotor coordination. Leaning and replication of such human-like strategies can lead to the development of more sophisticated robots…

In this preliminary study, we investigate changes in handover behaviour when transferring hazardous objects with the help of a high-resolution touch sensor. Participants were asked to hand over a safe and hazardous object (a full cup and an…

Humans naturally exploit haptic feedback during contact-rich tasks like loading a dishwasher or stocking a bookshelf. Current robotic systems focus on avoiding unexpected contact, often relying on strategically placed environment sensors.…

Eating speed is an important indicator that has been widely investigated in nutritional studies. The relationship between eating speed and several intake-related problems such as obesity, diabetes, and oral health has received increased…

In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…

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…

Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…

Robots learn as they interact with humans. Consider a human teleoperating an assistive robot arm: as the human guides and corrects the arm's motion, the robot gathers information about the human's desired task. But how does the human know…

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…

Robots are required to autonomously respond to changing situations. Imitation learning is a promising candidate for achieving generalization performance, and extensive results have been demonstrated in object manipulation. However,…

Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…

Robot-assisted surgery has revolutionized the healthcare industry by providing surgeons with greater precision, reducing invasiveness, and improving patient outcomes. However, the success of these surgeries depends heavily on the robotic…

We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot…