Related papers: RoTipBot: Robotic Handling of Thin and Flexible Ob…

For robot arms to perform everyday tasks in unstructured environments, these robots must be able to manipulate a diverse range of objects. Today's robots often grasp objects with either soft grippers or rigid end-effectors. However, purely…

Humans display the remarkable ability to sense the world through tools and other held objects. For example, we are able to pinpoint impact locations on a held rod and tell apart different textures using a rigid probe. In this work, we…

We study gravitational pivoting, a constrained version of in-hand manipulation, where we aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper. To achieve this, instead of controlling the gripper to avoid…

Manipulation in cluttered environments like homes requires stable grasps, precise placement and robustness against external contact. We present the Soft-Bubble gripper system with a highly compliant gripping surface and dense-geometry…

Over the past few decades, efforts have been made towards robust robotic grasping, and therefore dexterous manipulation. The soft gripper has shown their potential in robust grasping due to their inherent properties-low, control complexity,…

The accumulation of litter is increasing in many places and is consequently becoming a problem that must be dealt with. In this paper, we present a manipulator robotic system to collect litter in outdoor environments. This system has three…

In this work, we report on the integrated sensorimotor control of the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, an anthropomorphic soft robot hand designed around the principle of adaptive synergies, with the BRL tactile fingertip (TacTip), a soft biomimetic…

In this paper, a novel tactile sensing mechanism for soft robotic fingers is proposed. Inspired by the proprioception mechanism found in mammals, the proposed approach infers tactile information from a strain sensor attached on the finger's…

Cutting is a common form of manipulation when working with divisible objects such as food, rope, or clay. Cooking in particular relies heavily on cutting to divide food items into desired shapes. However, cutting food is a challenging task…

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…

This study proposed a novel robotic gripper that can achieve grasping and infinite wrist twisting motions using a single actuator. The gripper is equipped with a differential gear mechanism that allows switching between the grasping and…

Tactile feedback is critical for understanding the dynamics of both rigid and deformable objects in many manipulation tasks, such as non-prehensile manipulation and dense packing. We introduce an approach that combines visual and tactile…

Pneumatically operated soft growing robots that extend via tip eversion are well-suited for navigation in confined spaces. Adding the ability to interact with the environment using sensors and tools attached to the robot tip would greatly…

Many objects commonly found in household and industrial environments are represented by cylindrical and cubic shapes. Thus, it is available for robots to manipulate them through the real-time detection of elliptic and rectangle shape…

Handling fragile objects remains a major challenge for robotic manipulation. Tactile sensing and soft robotics can improve delicate object handling, but typically involve high integration complexity or slow response times. We address these…

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical…

Tactile sensing plays a fundamental role in enabling robots to navigate dynamic and unstructured environments, particularly in applications such as delicate object manipulation, surface exploration, and human-robot interaction. In this…

Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…

Grasping is a core task in robotics with various applications. However, most current implementations are primarily designed for rigid items, and their performance drops considerably when handling fragile or deformable materials that require…

Achieving robust dexterous manipulation in unstructured domestic environments remains a significant challenge in robotics. Even with state-of-the-art robot learning methods, haptic-oblivious control strategies (i.e. those relying only on…