Related papers: Learning Goal-Directed Object Pushing in Cluttered…
The choice of a grasp plays a critical role in the success of downstream manipulation tasks. Consider a task of placing an object in a cluttered scene; the majority of possible grasps may not be suitable for the desired placement. In this…
Goal-conditioned robotic grasping in cluttered environments remains a challenging problem due to occlusions caused by surrounding objects, which prevent direct access to the target object. A promising solution to mitigate this issue is…
Robotic pick and place stands at the heart of autonomous manipulation. When conducted in cluttered or complex environments robots must jointly reason about the selected grasp and desired placement locations to ensure success. While several…
We study an emerging problem named "grasping the invisible" in robotic manipulation, in which a robot is tasked to grasp an initially invisible target object via a sequence of pushing and grasping actions. In this problem, pushes are needed…
In robotic grasping, objects are often occluded in ungraspable configurations such that no pregrasp pose can be found, eg large flat boxes on the table that can only be grasped from the side. Inspired by humans' bimanual manipulation, eg…
Deep learning provides a powerful framework for automated acquisition of complex robotic motions. However, despite a certain degree of generalization, the need for vast amounts of training data depending on the work-object position is an…
This thesis is concerned with deriving planning algorithms for robot manipulators. Manipulation has two effects, the robot has a physical effect on the object, and it also acquires information about the object. This thesis presents…
We address the manipulation task of retrieving a target object from a cluttered shelf. When the target object is hidden, the robot must search through the clutter for retrieving it. Solving this task requires reasoning over the likely…
Grasping target objects is a fundamental skill for robotic manipulation, but in cluttered environments with stacked or occluded objects, a single-step grasp is often insufficient. To address this, previous work has introduced pushing as an…
Prehensile object rearrangement in cluttered and confined spaces has broad applications but is also challenging. For instance, rearranging products in a grocery shelf means that the robot cannot directly access all objects and has limited…
Manipulation of objects by exploiting their contact with the environment can enhance both the dexterity and payload capability of robotic manipulators. A common way to manipulate heavy objects beyond the payload capability of a robot is to…
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'…
We present an algorithm determining where to relocate objects inside a cluttered and confined space while rearranging objects to retrieve a target object. Although methods that decide what to remove have been proposed, planning for the…
In physical human-robot interaction, force feedback has been the most common sensing modality to convey the human intention to the robot. It is widely used in admittance control to allow the human to direct the robot. However, it cannot be…
In this paper, we introduce a method to deal with the problem of robot local path planning among pushable objects -- an open problem in robotics. In particular, we achieve that by training multiple agents simultaneously in a physics-based…
We present placing via picking (PvP), a method to autonomously collect real-world demonstrations for a family of placing tasks in which objects must be manipulated to specific, contact-constrained locations. With PvP, we approach the…
6D grasping in cluttered scenes is a longstanding problem in robotic manipulation. Open-loop manipulation pipelines may fail due to inaccurate state estimation, while most end-to-end grasping methods have not yet scaled to complex scenes…
Manipulation of large objects over long horizons (such as carts in a warehouse) is an essential skill for deployable robotic systems. Large objects require mobile manipulation which involves simultaneous manipulation, navigation, and…
Efficient tabletop rearrangement remains challenging due to collisions and the need for temporary buffering when target poses are obstructed. Prehensile pick-and-place provides precise control but often requires extra moves, whereas…
The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid…