Related papers: DIFFTACTILE: A Physics-based Differentiable Tactil…
Robots are increasingly expected to manipulate objects in ever more unstructured environments where the object properties have high perceptual uncertainty from any single sensory modality. This directly impacts successful object…
Executing contact-rich manipulation tasks necessitates the fusion of tactile and visual feedback. However, the distinct nature of these modalities poses significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce a system that leverages visual and…
The human skin exhibits remarkable capability to perceive contact forces and environmental temperatures, providing intricate information essential for nuanced manipulation. Despite recent advancements in soft tactile sensors, a significant…
Robotic palpation relies on force sensing, but force signals in soft-tissue environments are variable and cannot reliably reveal subtle subsurface features. We present a compact multimodal sensor that integrates high-resolution vision-based…
Tactile sensors are believed to be essential in robotic manipulation, and prior works often rely on experts to reason the sensor feedback and design a controller. With the recent advancement in data-driven approaches, complicated…
We present a differentiable soft-body physics simulator that can be composed with neural networks as a differentiable layer. In contrast to other differentiable physics approaches that use explicit forward models to define state…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…
We introduce a general differentiable solver for time-dependent deformation problems with contact and friction. Our approach uses a finite element discretization with a high-order time integrator coupled with the recently proposed…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
The images captured by vision-based tactile sensors carry information about high-resolution tactile fields, such as the distribution of the contact forces applied to their soft sensing surface. However, extracting the information encoded in…
Achieving robust dexterous manipulation in unstructured domestic environments remains a significant challenge in robotics. Even with state-of-the-art robot learning methods, haptic-oblivious control strategies (i.e. those relying only on…
Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…
Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving…
Recently, tactile sensing has attracted great interest in robotics, especially for facilitating exploration of unstructured environments and effective manipulation. A detailed understanding of the surface textures via tactile sensing is…
Deformable objects manipulation can benefit from representations that seamlessly integrate vision and touch while handling occlusions. In this work, we present a novel approach for, and real-world demonstration of, multimodal visuo-tactile…
Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…
Tactile sensors have long been valued for their perceptual capabilities, offering rich insights into the otherwise hidden interface between the robot and grasped objects. Yet their inherent compliance -- a key driver of force-rich…
Soft sensors have continued growing interest in robotics, due to their ability to enable both passive conformal contact from the material properties and active contact data from the sensor properties. However, the same properties of…
In conjunction with huge recent progress in camera and computer vision technology, camera-based sensors have increasingly shown considerable promise in relation to tactile sensing. In comparison to competing technologies (be they resistive,…
Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight,…