Related papers: Sim2Real Manipulation on Unknown Objects with Tact…

Robotic insertion tasks are characterized by contact and friction mechanics, making them challenging for conventional feedback control methods due to unmodeled physical effects. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

In this paper we tackle the problem of deformable object manipulation through model-free visual reinforcement learning (RL). In order to circumvent the sample inefficiency of RL, we propose two key ideas that accelerate learning. First, we…

Vision and learning have made significant progress that could improve robotics policies for complex tasks and environments. Learning deep neural networks for image understanding, however, requires large amounts of domain-specific visual…

Imitation learning is a popular paradigm to teach robots new tasks, but collecting robot demonstrations through teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching is tedious and time-consuming. In contrast, directly demonstrating a task using our human…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can automate a wide variety of robotic skills, but learning each new skill requires considerable real-world data collection and manual representation engineering to design policy classes or features. Using deep…

Deep reinforcement learning has recently seen huge success across multiple areas in the robotics domain. Owing to the limitations of gathering real-world data, i.e., sample inefficiency and the cost of collecting it, simulation environments…

Robot simulation has been an essential tool for data-driven manipulation tasks. However, most existing simulation frameworks lack either efficient and accurate models of physical interactions with tactile sensors or realistic tactile…

The field of robotic manipulation has advanced significantly in recent years. At the sensing level, several novel tactile sensors have been developed, capable of providing accurate contact information. On a methodological level, learning…

Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is playing an increasingly important role in fields such as robotic control and autonomous driving. However, the gap between simulation and the real environment remains a major obstacle to the practical…

Tactile sensing is critical for robotic grasping and manipulation of objects under visual occlusion. However, in contrast to simulations of robot arms and cameras, current simulations of tactile sensors have limited accuracy, speed, and…

Tactile perception is central to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. However, it requires contact, and a mature implementation must infer object models while also accounting for the motion induced by the interaction. In this…

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for tactile-based dexterous manipulation learning with a blind anthropomorphic robotic hand, i.e. without visual sensing. First, object-related states were extracted from the raw tactile signals…

To catch a thrown object, a robot must be able to perceive the object's motion and generate control actions in a timely manner. Rather than explicitly estimating the object's 3D position, this work focuses on a novel approach that…

Recent work in sim2real has successfully enabled robots to act in physical environments by training in simulation with a diverse ''population'' of environments (i.e. domain randomization). In this work, we focus on enabling generalization…

Manipulating objects with two multi-fingered hands has been a long-standing challenge in robotics, due to the contact-rich nature of many manipulation tasks and the complexity inherent in coordinating a high-dimensional bimanual system. In…

Stable and robust robotic grasping is essential for current and future robot applications. In recent works, the use of large datasets and supervised learning has enhanced speed and precision in antipodal grasping. However, these methods…

Recent works in robotic manipulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) have shown potential for tackling a range of tasks e.g., opening a drawer or a cupboard. However, these techniques generalize poorly to…

Tactile-based blind grasping addresses realistic robotic grasping in which the hand only has access to proprioceptive and tactile sensors. The robotic hand has no prior knowledge of the object/grasp properties, such as object weight,…