Related papers: Dynamic On-Palm Manipulation via Controlled Slidin…
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…
Non-prehensile manipulation such as pushing is typically subject to uncertain, non-smooth dynamics. However, modeling the uncertainty of the dynamics typically results in intractable belief dynamics, making data-efficient planning under…
Contact-rich manipulation has become increasingly important in robot learning. However, previous studies on robot learning datasets have focused on rigid objects and underrepresented the diversity of pressure conditions for real-world…
We present a differentiable dynamics solver that is able to handle frictional contact for rigid and deformable objects within a unified framework. Through a principled mollification of normal and tangential contact forces, our method…
The discontinuities and multi-modality introduced by contacts make manipulation planning challenging. Many previous works avoid this problem by pre-designing a set of high-level motion primitives like grasping and pushing. However, such…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
Long-horizon contact-rich manipulation has long been a challenging problem, as it requires reasoning over both discrete contact modes and continuous object motion. We introduce Implicit Contact Diffuser (ICD), a diffusion-based model that…
This paper develops closed-loop tactile controllers for dexterous robotic manipulation with a dual-palm robotic system. Tactile dexterity is an approach to dexterous manipulation that plans for robot/object interactions that render…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…
This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion. A…
Reasoning about rolling and sliding contact, or roll-slide contact for short, is critical for dexterous manipulation tasks that involve intricate geometries. But existing works on roll-slide contact mostly focus on continuous shapes with…
In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…
Microscale manipulation has advanced substantially in controlled locomotion and targeted transport, yet many biomedical applications require precise and adaptive interaction with biological micro-objects. At these scales, manipulation is…
This work explores the use of topological tools for achieving effective non-prehensile manipulation in cluttered, constrained workspaces. In particular, it proposes the use of persistent homology as a guiding principle in identifying the…
As robots shift from industrial to human-centered spaces, adopting mobile manipulators, which expand workspace capabilities, becomes crucial. In these settings, seamless interaction with humans necessitates compliant control. Two common…
In this paper, a novel switching pushing skill algorithm is proposed to improve the efficiency of planar non-prehensile manipulation, which draws inspiration from human pushing actions and comprises two sub-problems, i.e., discrete…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…
This paper focuses on a challenging setting of simultaneously modeling geometry and appearance of hand-object interaction scenes without any object priors. We follow the trend of dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting based methods, and address…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
The hybrid nature of multi-contact robotic systems, due to making and breaking contact with the environment, creates significant challenges for high-quality control. Existing model-based methods typically rely on either good prior knowledge…