Related papers: Robotic Object Insertion with a Soft Wrist through…

Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…

To catch a thrown object, a robot must be able to perceive the object's motion and generate control actions in a timely manner. Rather than explicitly estimating the object's 3D position, this work focuses on a novel approach that…

This paper presents a correspondence-free, function-based sim-to-real learning method for controlling deformable freeform surfaces. Unlike traditional sim-to-real transfer methods that strongly rely on marker points with full…

Tracking the pose of an object while it is being held and manipulated by a robot hand is difficult for vision-based methods due to significant occlusions. Prior works have explored using contact feedback and particle filters to localize…

Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…

Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…

One of the first tasks we learn as children is to grasp objects based on our tactile perception. Incorporating such skill in robots will enable multiple applications, such as increasing flexibility in industrial processes or providing…

Safe yet stable grasping requires a robotic hand to apply sufficient force on the object to immobilize it while keeping it from getting damaged. Soft robotic hands have been proposed for safe grasping due to their passive compliance, but…

We propose the first framework to learn control policies for vision-based human-to-robot handovers, a critical task for human-robot interaction. While research in Embodied AI has made significant progress in training robot agents in…

Reorienting diverse objects with a multi-fingered hand is a challenging task. Current methods in robotic in-hand manipulation are either object-specific or require permanent supervision of the object state from visual sensors. This is far…

Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…

Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…

In recent years, synthetic data has been widely used in the training of 6D pose estimation networks, in part because it automatically provides perfect annotation at low cost. However, there are still non-trivial domain gaps, such as…

The tie-knotting task is highly challenging due to the tie's high deformation and long-horizon manipulation actions. This work presents TieBot, a Real-to-Sim-to-Real learning from visual demonstration system for the robots to learn to knot…

Controlling contact forces during interactions is critical for locomotion and manipulation tasks. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has succeeded in many contact-rich problems, current RL methods achieve forceful interactions…

Whole-body manipulation is a powerful yet underexplored approach that enables robots to interact with large, heavy, or awkward objects using more than just their end-effectors. Soft robots, with their inherent passive compliance, are…

We study the problem of placing a grasped object on an empty flat surface in an upright orientation, such as placing a cup on its bottom rather than on its side. We aim to find the required object rotation such that when the gripper is…

Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…

In this paper, we address the problem of tactile sim-to-real policy transfer for contact-rich tasks. Existing methods primarily focus on vision-based sensors and emphasize image rendering quality while providing overly simplistic models of…

We want to build robots that are useful in unstructured real world applications, such as doing work in the household. Grasping in particular is an important skill in this domain, yet it remains a challenge. One of the key hurdles is…