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Human hands can not only grasp objects of various shape and size and manipulate them in hands but also exert such a large gripping force that they can support the body in the situations such as dangling a bar and climbing a ladder. On the…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
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…
Autonomous manipulation of granular media, such as sand, is crucial for applications in construction, excavation, and additive manufacturing. However, shaping granular materials presents unique challenges due to their high-dimensional…
Mobile manipulators for indoor human environments can serve as versatile devices that perform a variety of tasks, yet adoption of this technology has been limited. Reducing size, weight, and cost could facilitate adoption, but risks…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
Reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for enabling autonomous acquisition of complex robotic manipulation skills, but realizing this potential in real-world settings has been challenging. We present a human-in-the-loop…
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…
How should a robot direct active vision so as to ensure reliable grasping? We answer this question for the case of dexterous grasping of unfamiliar objects. By dexterous grasping we simply mean grasping by any hand with more than two…
Continuous in-hand manipulation is an important physical interaction skill, where tactile sensing provides indispensable contact information to enable dexterous manipulation of small objects. This work proposed a framework for end-to-end…
Simulation is a central tool for scalable robot learning, but its effectiveness depends on the quality of object assets. While modern 3D datasets provide rich geometric and kinematic representations, they typically lack the physical…
Mobile manipulators in the home can provide increased autonomy to individuals with severe motor impairments, who often cannot complete activities of daily living (ADLs) without the help of a caregiver. Teleoperation of an assistive mobile…
In this paper, we consider the problem of non-prehensile manipulation using grasped objects. This problem is a superset of many common manipulation skills including instances of tool-use (e.g., grasped spatula flipping a burger) and…
Dexterous hands enable concurrent prehensile and nonprehensile manipulation, such as holding one object while interacting with another, a capability essential for everyday tasks yet underexplored in robotics. Learning such long-horizon,…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Dexterous multi-fingered hands can accomplish fine manipulation behaviors that are infeasible with simple robotic grippers. However, sophisticated multi-fingered hands are often expensive and fragile. Low-cost soft hands offer an appealing…
Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shape and surface properties remains, however, challenging. Most current…
Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…