Related papers: PaperBot: Learning to Design Real-World Tools Usin…

Novel robotic grippers have captured increasing interests recently because of their abilities to adapt to varieties of circumstances and their powerful functionalities. Differing from traditional gripper with mechanical components-made…

Hand gestures are an intuitive, socially acceptable, and a non-intrusive interaction modality in Mixed Reality (MR) and smartphone based applications. Unlike speech interfaces, they tend to perform well even in shared and public spaces.…

Billions of people use chopsticks, a simple yet versatile tool, for fine manipulation of everyday objects. The small, curved, and slippery tips of chopsticks pose a challenge for picking up small objects, making them a suitably complex test…

Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…

Autonomous fabric manipulation is a longstanding challenge in robotics, but evaluating progress is difficult due to the cost and diversity of robot hardware. Using Reach, a cloud robotics platform that enables low-latency remote execution…

Robot learning provides a number of ways to teach robots simple skills, such as grasping. However, these skills are usually trained in open, clutter-free environments, and therefore would likely cause undesirable collisions in more complex,…

The ability to communicate with robots using natural language is a significant step forward in human-robot interaction. However, accurately translating verbal commands into physical actions is promising, but still presents challenges.…

We present a PaperRobot who performs as an automatic research assistant by (1) conducting deep understanding of a large collection of human-written papers in a target domain and constructing comprehensive background knowledge graphs (KGs);…

ReachBot, a proposed robotic platform, employs extendable booms as limbs for mobility in challenging environments, such as martian caves. When attached to the environment, ReachBot acts as a parallel robot, with reconfiguration driven by…

This paper explores the problem of autonomous, in-hand regrasping--the problem of moving from an initial grasp on an object to a desired grasp using the dexterity of a robot's fingers. We propose a planner for this problem which alternates…

We study gravitational pivoting, a constrained version of in-hand manipulation, where we aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper. To achieve this, instead of controlling the gripper to avoid…

This paper develops a flexible and robust robotic system for autonomous drawing on 3D surfaces. The system takes 2D drawing strokes and a 3D target surface (mesh or point clouds) as input. It maps the 2D strokes onto the 3D surface and…

Use of physics-based simulation as a planning model enables a planner to reason and generate plans that involve non-trivial interactions with the world. For example, grasping a milk container out of a cluttered refrigerator may involve…

While there have been significant strides in dexterous manipulation, most of it is limited to benchmark tasks like in-hand reorientation which are of limited utility in the real world. The main benefit of dexterous hands over two-fingered…

We present a novel method enabling robots to quickly learn to manipulate objects by leveraging a motion planner to generate "expert" training trajectories from a small amount of human-labeled data. In contrast to the traditional…

Humans throw and catch objects all the time. However, such a seemingly common skill introduces a lot of challenges for robots to achieve: The robots need to operate such dynamic actions at high-speed, collaborate precisely, and interact…

We propose a computational design tool to enable casual end-users to easily design, fabricate, and assemble flat-pack furniture with guaranteed manufacturability. Using our system, users select parameterized components from a library and…

Robotic grasping of arbitrary objects even in completely known environments still remains a challenging problem. Most previously developed algorithms had focused on fingertip grasp, failing to solve the problem even for fully actuated…

We introduce a novel design of parallel-jaw grippers drawing inspiration from pin-pression toys. The proposed pin-pression gripper features a distinctive mechanism in which each finger integrates a 2D array of pins capable of independent…

Tool use, a hallmark feature of human intelligence, remains a challenging problem in robotics due the complex contacts and high-dimensional action space. In this work, we present a novel method to enable reinforcement learning of tool use…