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Leveraging human motion data to impart robots with versatile manipulation skills has emerged as a promising paradigm in robotic manipulation. Nevertheless, translating multi-source human hand motions into feasible robot behaviors remains…

Nonprehensile manipulation, such as pushing and pulling, enables robots to move, align, or reposition objects that may be difficult to grasp due to their geometry, size, or relationship to the robot or the environment. Much of the existing…

Manipulating objects with robotic hands is a complicated task. Not only the fingers of the hand, but also the pose of the robot's end effector need to be coordinated. Using human demonstrations of movements is an intuitive and…

The nutritional quality of diets has significantly deteriorated over the past two to three decades, a decline often underestimated by the people. This deterioration, coupled with a hectic lifestyle, has contributed to escalating health…

Robotic assistance presents an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with physical disabilities, yet accurately sensing the human body and tracking human motion remain difficult for robots. We present a multidimensional capacitive…

Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…

Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…

Living a self-determined life independent of human caregivers or fully autonomous robots is a crucial factor for human dignity and the preservation of self-worth for people with motor impairments. Assistive robotic solutions - particularly…

Reliably planning fingertip grasps for multi-fingered hands lies as a key challenge for many tasks including tool use, insertion, and dexterous in-hand manipulation. This task becomes even more difficult when the robot lacks an accurate…

Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping depth images? The short answer is no: current day robots can't. In this article, we address the problem of shaping plastic material with an anthropomorphic arm/hand robot, which observes the…

Intelligent assistive technologies are increasingly recognized as critical daily-use enablers for people with disabilities and age-related functional decline. Longitudinal studies, curation of quality datasets, live monitoring in activities…

We propose a robotic manipulation system that can pivot objects on a surface using vision, wrist force and tactile sensing. We aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper by allowing rotational slip,…

Robotic assistive feeding holds significant promise for improving the quality of life for individuals with eating disabilities. However, acquiring diverse food items under varying conditions and generalizing to unseen food presents unique…

In this paper we propose an approach for efficient grasp selection for manipulation tasks of unknown objects. Even for simple tasks such as pick-and-place, a unique solution is rare to occur. Rather, multiple candidate grasps must be…

We investigate robotic assistants for dressing that can anticipate the motion of the person who is being helped. To this end, we use reinforcement learning to create models of human behavior during assistance with dressing. To explore this…

Service robots are expected to autonomously and efficiently work in human-centric environments. For this type of robots, object perception and manipulation are challenging tasks due to need for accurate and real-time response. This paper…

Planning a motion for inserting pegs remains an open problem. The difficulty lies in both the inevitable errors in the grasps of a robotic hand and absolute precision problems in robot joint motors. This paper proposes an integral method to…

Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is to iron a piece of cloth autonomously. Given a roughly flattened cloth, the goal is to have an ironing plan that can iteratively apply a regular iron to…

Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…

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…