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Manipulating unseen objects is challenging without a 3D representation, as objects generally have occluded surfaces. This requires physical interaction with objects to build their internal representations. This paper presents an approach…
Robots that traverse natural terrain must interpret contact forces generated under highly dynamic conditions. However, most terrain characterization approaches rely on quasi-static assumptions that neglect velocity- and…
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
Learning object manipulation is a critical skill for robots to interact with their environment. Even though there has been significant progress in robotic manipulation of rigid objects, interacting with non-rigid objects remains challenging…
Grasping large and flat objects (e.g. a book or a pan) is often regarded as an ungraspable task, which poses significant challenges due to the unreachable grasping poses. Previous works leverage Extrinsic Dexterity like walls or table edges…
Controlling Wheeled-legged robots is challenging especially on slippery surfaces due to their dependence on continuous ground contact. Unlike quadrupeds or bipeds, which can leverage multiple fixed contact points for recovery,…
Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve…
Legged robots have enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for…
Robotic spacecraft have helped expand our reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended…
Recent advances in generalist robot manipulation leverage pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and large-scale robot demonstrations to tackle diverse tasks in a zero-shot manner. A key challenge remains: scaling high-quality,…
This paper addresses the problem of legged locomotion in non-flat terrain. As legged robots such as quadrupeds are to be deployed in terrains with geometries which are difficult to model and predict, the need arises to equip them with the…
Multi-legged robots offer enhanced stability to navigate complex terrains with their multiple legs interacting with the environment. However, how to effectively coordinate the multiple legs in a larger action exploration space to generate…
Robotic manipulation of deformable and fragile objects presents significant challenges, as excessive stress can lead to irreversible damage to the object. While existing solutions rely on accurate object models or specialized sensors and…
Celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars are mainly covered by loose, granular soil, a notoriously challenging terrain to traverse with (wheeled) robotic systems. Here, we present experimental work on traversing steep, granular slopes…
Autonomous excavation is a challenging task. The unknown contact dynamics between the excavator bucket and the terrain could easily result in large contact forces and jamming problems during excavation. Traditional model-based methods…
This paper proposes to solve the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation with legged robots, which not only provides a flexible way for humans to command but also allows the robot to navigate through more challenging and cluttered scenes.…
Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
To perform household tasks, assistive robots receive commands in the form of user language instructions for tool manipulation. The initial stage involves selecting the intended tool (i.e., object grounding) and grasping it in a…