Related papers: An Adaptable, Safe, and Portable Robot-Assisted Fe…
A robot guide dog has compelling advantages over animal guide dogs for its cost-effectiveness, potential for mass production, and low maintenance burden. However, despite the long history of guide dog robot research, previous studies were…
The ability to deal with articulated objects is very important for robots assisting humans. In this work, a framework to robustly and adaptively operate common doors, using an autonomous mobile manipulator, is proposed. To push forward the…
We present our general-purpose mobile manipulation system consisting of a custom robot platform and key algorithms spanning perception and planning. To extensively test the system in the wild and benchmark its performance, we choose a…
Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability…
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…
Guiding robots, in the form of canes or cars, have recently been explored to assist blind and low vision (BLV) people. Such robots can provide full or partial autonomy when guiding. However, the pros and cons of different forms and autonomy…
Animals exhibit remarkable feats of behavioral flexibility and multifunctional control that remain challenging for robotic systems. The neural and morphological basis of multifunctionality in animals can provide a source of bio-inspiration…
Teaching a multi-fingered dexterous robot to grasp objects in the real world has been a challenging problem due to its high dimensional state and action space. We propose a robot-learning system that can take a small number of human…
Mobile robots navigating in crowds trained using reinforcement learning are known to suffer performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution scenarios. We propose that by properly accounting for the uncertainties of pedestrians,…
Reliable perception is essential for robots that interact with the world. But sensors alone are often insufficient to provide this capability, and they are prone to errors due to various conditions in the environment. Furthermore, there is…
In this study, an adaptive object deformability-agnostic human-robot collaborative transportation framework is presented. The proposed framework enables to combine the haptic information transferred through the object with the human…
Recent studies have focused on developing advanced assistive devices to help blind or visually impaired people. Navigation is challenging for this community; however, developing a simple yet reliable navigation system is still an unmet…
Robot arms that assist humans should be able to pick up, move, and release everyday objects. Today's assistive robot arms use rigid grippers to pinch items between fingers; while these rigid grippers are well suited for large and heavy…
Robots are increasingly working alongside people, delivering food to patrons in restaurants or helping workers on assembly lines. These scenarios often involve object handovers between the person and the robot. To achieve safe and efficient…
Safe learning is central to AI-enabled robots where a single failure may lead to catastrophic results. Barrier-based method is one of the dominant approaches for safe robot learning. However, this method is not scalable, hard to train, and…
Wheeled robots are highly efficient in human living environments. However, conventional wheeled designs, with their limited degrees of freedom and constraints in robot configuration, struggle to simultaneously achieve stability,…
Autonomous robotic surgery has the potential to provide efficacy, safety, and consistency independent of individual surgeons skill and experience. Autonomous soft-tissue surgery in unstructured and deformable environments is especially…
While both navigation and manipulation are challenging topics in isolation, many tasks require the ability to both navigate and manipulate in concert. To this end, we propose a mobile manipulation system that leverages novel navigation and…
Robotic grasping is one of the most fundamental robotic manipulation tasks and has been actively studied. However, how to quickly teach a robot to grasp a novel target object in clutter remains challenging. This paper attempts to tackle the…
Mobile robot navigation has seen extensive research in the last decades. The aspect of collaboration with robots and humans sharing workspaces will become increasingly important in the future. Therefore, the next generation of mobile robots…