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In recent years, soft robotics simulators have evolved to offer various functionalities, including the simulation of different material types (e.g., elastic, hyper-elastic) and actuation methods (e.g., pneumatic, cable-driven, servomotor).…
Soft object manipulation poses significant challenges for robots, requiring effective techniques for state representation and manipulation policy learning. State representation involves capturing the dynamic changes in the environment,…
Learning robot tasks or controllers using deep reinforcement learning has been proven effective in simulations. Learning in simulation has several advantages. For example, one can fully control the simulated environment, including halting…
Precise kinematic modeling is critical in calibration and controller design for soft robots, yet remains a challenging issue due to their highly nonlinear and complex behaviors. To tackle the issue, numerous data-driven machine learning…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…
We study the problem of learning to perform multi-stage robotic manipulation tasks, with applications to cable routing, where the robot must route a cable through a series of clips. This setting presents challenges representative of complex…
We present a scheme for producing tunable active dynamics in a self-propelled robotic device. The robot moves using the differential drive mechanism where two wheels can vary their instantaneous velocities independently. These velocities…
Bridging the 'reality gap' that separates simulated robotics from experiments on hardware could accelerate robotic research through improved data availability. This paper explores domain randomization, a simple technique for training models…
In cable driven parallel robots (CDPRs), the payload is suspended using a network of cables whose length can be controlled to maneuver the payload within the workspace. Compared to rigid link robots, CDPRs provide better maneuverability due…
General-purpose simulators have accelerated the development of robots. Traditional simulators based on first-principles, however, typically require full-state observability or depend on parameter search for system identification. This work…
Nowadays, autonomous service robots are becoming an important topic in robotic research. Differently from typical industrial scenarios, with highly controlled environments, service robots must show an additional robustness to task…
There is a growing need for computational tools to automatically design and verify autonomous systems, especially complex robotic systems involving perception, planning, control, and hardware in the autonomy stack. Differentiable…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…
The rise of deep learning has caused a paradigm shift in robotics research, favoring methods that require large amounts of data. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to generate such data sets on a physical platform. Therefore,…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a desired skill in making robots ubiquitous in manufacturing, service, healthcare, and security. Deformable objects are common in our daily lives, e.g., wires, clothes, bed sheets, etc., and are…
The capability to transfer mastered skills to accomplish a range of similar yet novel tasks is crucial for intelligent robots. In this work, we introduce $\textit{Diff-Transfer}$, a novel framework leveraging differentiable physics…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
We present a differentiable pipeline for simulating the motion of objects that represent their geometry as a continuous density field parameterized as a deep network. This includes Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and other related models.…
In this paper, we present an online adaptive robust control framework for underactuated brachiating robots traversing flexible cables. Since the dynamic model of a flexible body is unknown in practice, we propose an indirect adaptive…