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

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…

This paper introduces a discrete-continuous action space to learn insertion primitives for robotic assembly tasks. Primitive is a sequence of elementary actions with certain exit conditions, such as "pushing down the peg until contact".…

Planning a motion for inserting pegs remains an open problem. The difficulty lies in both the inevitable errors in the grasps of a robotic hand and absolute precision problems in robot joint motors. This paper proposes an integral method to…

Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free…

This paper proposes a learning-based visual peg-in-hole that enables training with several shapes in simulation, and adapting to arbitrary unseen shapes in real world with minimal sim-to-real cost. The core idea is to decouple the…

Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. It is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines these modalities which have very different characteristics.…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been widely applied for robotic manipulations via sim-to-real transfer, typically with proprioceptive and visual information. However, the incorporation of tactile sensing into RL for contact-rich…

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown some impressive successes in robotic manipulation applications. However, training robots in the real world is nontrivial owing to sample efficiency and safety concerns. Sim-to-real…

The advent of tactile sensors in robotics has sparked many ideas on how robots can leverage direct contact measurements of their environment interactions to improve manipulation tasks. An important line of research in this regard is that of…

We propose a method that actively estimates contact location between a grasped rigid object and its environment and uses this as input to a peg-in-hole insertion policy. An estimation model and an active tactile feedback controller work…

Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. However, it is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. While…

Industrial insertion tasks are often performed repetitively with parts that are subject to tight tolerances and prone to breakage. Learning an industrial insertion policy in real is challenging as the collision between the parts and the…

We need to look at our shoelaces as we first learn to tie them but having mastered this skill, can do it from touch alone. We call this phenomenon "sensory scaffolding": observation streams that are not needed by a master might yet aid a…

Robotic insertion tasks are characterized by contact and friction mechanics, making them challenging for conventional feedback control methods due to unmodeled physical effects. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for…

Robot manipulation requires a complex set of skills that need to be carefully combined and coordinated to solve a task. Yet, most ReinforcementLearning (RL) approaches in robotics study tasks which actually consist only of a single…

We present a learnable physics-based predictive model that provides accurate motion and force-torque prediction of the robot end effector in contact-rich manipulation. The proposed model extends the state-of-the-art GNN-based simulator…

This paper addresses the challenges of Rhythmic Insertion Tasks (RIT), where a robot must repeatedly perform high-precision insertions, such as screwing a nut into a bolt with a wrench. The inherent difficulty of RIT lies in achieving…

Achieving zero-shot peg insertion, where inserting an arbitrary peg into an unseen hole without task-specific training, remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. This task demands a highly generalizable perception system capable of…

Robotic assembly of complex, non-convex geometries with tight clearances remains a challenging problem, demanding precise state estimation for successful insertion. In this work, we propose a novel framework that relies solely on contact…

We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling approaches…