Related papers: Pushing in the Dark: A Reactive Pushing Strategy f…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
As robot make their way out of factories into human environments, outer space, and beyond, they require the skill to manipulate their environment in multifarious, unforeseeable circumstances. With this regard, pushing is an essential motion…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
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…
Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…
In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…
It is necessary for a mobile robot to be able to efficiently plan a path from its starting, or current, location to a desired goal location. This is a trivial task when the environment is static. However, the operational environment of the…
Non-prehensile manipulation, such as pushing objects to a desired target position, is an important skill for robots to assist humans in everyday situations. However, the task is challenging due to the large variety of objects with different…
We propose a planning and control approach to physics-based manipulation. The key feature of the algorithm is that it can adapt to the accuracy requirements of a task, by slowing down and generating `careful' motion when the task requires…
Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…
We present a robot base placement and control method that enables a mobile manipulator to gracefully recover from manipulation failures while performing tasks on-the-move. A mobile manipulator in motion has a limited window to complete a…
This paper investigates one of the most challenging tasks in dynamic manipulation -- catching large-momentum moving objects. Beyond the realm of quasi-static manipulation, dealing with highly dynamic objects can significantly improve the…
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…
In this paper, we address the challenge of performing non-prehensile pushing operations with a compliant robotic manipulation system. To ensure safe operations in human-populated environments, robots must comply with external physical…
Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…
Tactile perception is a crucial sensing modality in robotics, particularly in scenarios that require precise manipulation and safe interaction with other objects. Previous research in this area has focused extensively on tactile perception…
The perception and recognition of the surroundings is one of the essential tasks for a robot. With preliminary knowledge about a target object, it can perform various manipulation tasks such as rolling motion, palpation, and force control.…
Adept manipulation of articulated objects is essential for robots to operate successfully in human environments. Such manipulation requires both effectiveness--reliable operation despite uncertain object structures--and efficiency--swift…
Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…
In this paper, we introduce a method to deal with the problem of robot local path planning among pushable objects -- an open problem in robotics. In particular, we achieve that by training multiple agents simultaneously in a physics-based…