Related papers: Interactive Identification of Granular Materials u…

Grasp force estimation can help prevent robots from damaging delicate objects during manipulation and improve learning-based robotic control. Integrating force sensing into deformable grippers negotiates trade-offs in cost, complexity,…

When objects are packed in a cluster, physical interactions are unavoidable. Such interactions emerge because of the objects geometric features; some of these features promote entanglement, while others create repulsion. When entanglement…

The most difficult aspect of the realistic modeling of granular materials is how to capture the real shape of the particles. Here we present a method to simulate granular materials with complex-shaped particles. The particle shape is…

Granular materials are a ubiquitous yet ill-understood class of media. Many different approaches and techniques have been developed to understand the many complex behaviors they exhibit but none have been completely successful. We present a…

A key challenge in robotic food manipulation is modeling the material properties of diverse and deformable food items. We propose using a multimodal sensory approach to interact and play with food that facilitates the ability to distinguish…

Granular materials exhibit intricate force networks, often concentrated in chains rather than being uniformly distributed. These meso-scale structures are complex to characterize, owing to their heterogeneous and anisotropic nature. We…

Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…

Dense collections of movable objects are common in everyday spaces-from cabinets in a home to shelves in a warehouse. Safely retracting objects from such collections is difficult for robots, yet people do it frequently, leveraging learned…

Typical contact detection is based on the monitoring of a threshold value in the force and torque signals. The selection of a threshold is challenging for robots operating in unstructured or highly dynamic environments, such in a household…

Robotic manipulation of volumetric elastoplastic deformable materials, from foods such as dough to construction materials like clay, is in its infancy, largely due to the difficulty of modelling and perception in a high-dimensional space.…

This article presents a new force model for performing quantitative simulations of dense granular materials. Interactions between multiple contacts (MC) on the same grain are explicitly taken into account. Our readily applicable method…

As a complementary tool to laboratory experiments, discrete numerical simulation, applied to granular materials, provides valuable information on the grain and contact scale microstructure, thereby enabling one to better understand the…

The control of granular materials, showing up in many industrial applications, is a challenging open research problem. Granular material systems are complex-behavior (as they could have solid-, fluid-, and gas-like behaviors) and…

Granular materials transmit stress via a network of force chains. Despite the importance of these chains to characterizing the stress state and dynamics of the system, there is no common framework for quantifying their their properties.…

Photoelastic techniques are used to make both qualitative and quantitative measurements of the forces within idealized granular materials. The method is based on placing a birefringent granular material between a pair of polarizing filters,…

Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…

Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…

Grasping compliant objects is difficult for robots - applying too little force may cause the grasp to fail, while too much force may lead to object damage. A robot needs to apply the right amount of force to quickly and confidently grasp…

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.…

Large Vision Models trained on internet-scale data have demonstrated strong capabilities in segmenting and semantically understanding object parts, even in cluttered, crowded scenes. However, while these models can direct a robot toward the…