Related papers: RoPotter: Toward Robotic Pottery and Deformable Ob…
Existing shape estimation methods for deformable object manipulation suffer from the drawbacks of being off-line, model dependent, noise-sensitive or occlusion-sensitive, and thus are not appropriate for manipulation tasks requiring high…
Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…
Robotic manipulation of volumetric elastoplastic deformable materials, from foods such as dough to construction materials like clay, is in its infancy, largely due to the difficulty of modelling and perception in a high-dimensional space.…
Manipulating deformable objects in robotic cells is often costly and not widely accessible. However, the use of localized pneumatic gripping systems can enhance accessibility. Current methods that use pneumatic grippers to handle deformable…
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…
Manipulation of objects by exploiting their contact with the environment can enhance both the dexterity and payload capability of robotic manipulators. A common way to manipulate heavy objects beyond the payload capability of a robot is to…
Dexterous multi-fingered hands can provide robots with the ability to flexibly perform a wide range of manipulation skills. However, many of the more complex behaviors are also notoriously difficult to control: Performing in-hand object…
Deformable object manipulation requires computationally efficient representations that are compatible with robotic sensing modalities. In this paper, we present VIRDO:an implicit, multi-modal, and continuous representation for…
Manipulating elasto-plastic objects remains a significant challenge due to severe self-occlusion, difficulties of representation, and complicated dynamics. This work proposes a novel framework for elasto-plastic object manipulation with a…
Robots are increasingly envisioned as human companions, assisting with everyday tasks that often involve manipulating deformable objects. Although recent advances in robotic hardware and embodied AI have expanded their capabilities, current…
If robots could reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects, they could find applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance. Analytic models of elastic, 3D deformable objects require…
Vision foundation models trained on massive amounts of visual data have shown unprecedented reasoning and planning skills in open-world settings. A key challenge in applying them to robotic tasks is the modality gap between visual data and…
Wheelchair-mounted robotic arms (and other assistive robots) should help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control…
Dexterous manipulation with a multi-finger hand is one of the most challenging problems in robotics. While recent progress in imitation learning has largely improved the sample efficiency compared to Reinforcement Learning, the learned…
Intelligence lies not only in the brain (decision-making processes) but in the body (physical morphology). The morphology of robots can significantly influence how they interact with the physical world, crucial for manipulating objects in…
For robot manipulation, a complete and accurate object shape is desirable. Here, we present a method that combines visual and haptic reconstruction in a closed-loop pipeline. From an initial viewpoint, the object shape is reconstructed…
Replicating human-like dexterity in robot hands represents one of the largest open problems in robotics. Reinforcement learning is a promising approach that has achieved impressive progress in the last few years; however, the class of…
What does it take to build mobile manipulation systems that can competently operate on previously unseen objects in previously unseen environments? This work answers this question using opening of articulated structures as a mobile…
Deformable objects often appear in unstructured configurations. Tracing deformable objects helps bringing them into extended states and facilitating the downstream manipulation tasks. Due to the requirements for object-specific modeling or…
One important vision of robotics is to provide physical assistance by manipulating different everyday objects, e.g., hand tools, kitchen utensils. However, many objects designed for dexterous hand-control are not easily manipulable by a…