Related papers: Task-Driven Manipulation with Reconfigurable Paral…
Robotic manipulation in complex, constrained spaces is vital for widespread applications but challenging, particularly when navigating narrow passages with elongated objects. Existing planning methods often fail in these low-clearance…
For humanoid robots to live up to their potential utility, they must be able to robustly recover from instabilities. In this work, we propose a number of balance enhancements to enable the robot to both achieve specific, desired footholds…
Continuum robots, characterized by their high flexibility and infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs), have gained prominence in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and hazardous environment exploration. However, the intrinsic…
Manipulating cables is challenging for robots because of the infinite degrees of freedom of the cables and frequent occlusion by the gripper and the environment. These challenges are further complicated by the dexterous nature of the…
Human-Robot-Collaboration can enhance workflows by leveraging the mutual strengths of human operators and robots. Planning and understanding robot movements remain major challenges in this domain. This problem is prevalent in dynamic…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
This work presents a reinforcement learning-based switching control mechanism to autonomously move a ferromagnetic object (representing a milliscale robot) around obstacles within a constrained environment in the presence of disturbances.…
We present a reactive base control method that enables high performance mobile manipulation on-the-move in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Performing manipulation tasks while the mobile base remains in motion can…
With a slender redundant body, the tendon-driven robot (TDR) has a large workspace and great maneuverability while working in complex environments. TDR comprises multiple independently controlled robot segments, each with a set of driving…
Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive,…
Recently, many humanoid robots have been increasingly deployed in various facilities, including hospitals and assisted living environments, where they are often remotely controlled by human operators. Their kinematic redundancy enhances…
Planning the motion path for a tightly coupled dual-arm space manipulator under closed-chain constraints is a fundamental yet challenging problem in on-orbit assembly of large-scale space structures. The closed-chain constraints…
Autonomous robots have real-world applications in diverse fields, such as mobile manipulation and environmental exploration, and many such tasks benefit from a hands-off approach in terms of human user involvement over a long task horizon.…
We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…
Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar…
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…
Mobile Manipulation (MM) systems are ideal candidates for taking up the role of a personal assistant in unstructured real-world environments. Among other challenges, MM requires effective coordination of the robot's embodiments for…
Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable'…
This paper explores general multi-robot task and motion planning, where multiple robots in close proximity manipulate objects while satisfying constraints and a given goal. In particular, we formulate the plan refinement problem--which,…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…