Related papers: Learning Granular Media Avalanche Behavior for Ind…
Autonomous manipulation of articulated objects remains a fundamental challenge for robots in human environments. Vision-based methods can infer hidden kinematics but can yield imprecise estimates on unfamiliar objects. Tactile approaches…
Despite the recent advancements of vision-language-action (VLA) models on a variety of robotics tasks, they suffer from critical issues such as poor generalizability to unseen tasks, due to their reliance on behavior cloning exclusively…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
We have studied the dynamics of avalanching wet granular media in a rotating drum apparatus. Quantitative measurements of the flow velocity and the granular flux during avalanches allow us to characterize novel avalanche types unique to wet…
Animals such as rabbits and birds can instantly generate locomotion behavior in reaction to a dynamic, approaching object, such as a person or a rock, despite having possibly never seen the object before and having limited perception of the…
Legged robots face significant challenges in moving and navigating on deformable and highly yielding terrain such as mud. We present a resistive force model for legged foot-mud interactions. The model captures rheological behaviors such as…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise for robotic control, yet performance in complex household environments remains sub-optimal. Mobile manipulation requires reasoning about global scene layout, fine-grained geometry, and…
We focus on the task of language-conditioned grasping in clutter, in which a robot is supposed to grasp the target object based on a language instruction. Previous works separately conduct visual grounding to localize the target object, and…
Reorienting objects by using supports is a practical yet challenging manipulation task. Owing to the intricate geometry of objects and the constrained feasible motions of the robot, multiple manipulation steps are required for object…
Interactive navigation is crucial in scenarios where proactively interacting with objects can yield shorter paths, thus significantly improving traversal efficiency. Existing methods primarily focus on using the robot body to relocate large…
Learning data-efficient object dynamics models for robotic manipulation remains challenging, especially for deformable objects. A popular approach is to model objects as sets of 3D particles and learn their motion using graph neural…
Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs, and bodies. While the development of airplanes and…
Language-guided grasping has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling robots to identify and manipulate target objects through natural language instructions, yet it remains highly challenging in cluttered or occluded scenes. Existing…
When we move on snow, sand, or mud, the ground deforms under our feet, immediately affecting our gait. We propose a physically based model for computing such interactions in real time, from only the kinematic motion of a virtual character.…
Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging vision tasks, but their deployment on edge devices is severely hindered by the computational complexity and global reduction bottleneck imposed by layer…
This paper presents a gait controller for bipedal robots to achieve highly agile walking over various terrains given local slope and friction cone information. Without these considerations, untimely impacts can cause a robot to trip and…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…
Robotic caregivers could potentially improve the quality of life of many who require physical assistance. However, in order to assist individuals who are lying in bed, robots must be capable of dealing with a significant obstacle: the…
Off-road navigation on vertically challenging terrain, involving steep slopes and rugged boulders, presents significant challenges for wheeled robots both at the planning level to achieve smooth collision-free trajectories and at the…