Related papers: ScissorBot: Learning Generalizable Scissor Skill f…

Paper is a cheap, recyclable, and clean material that is often used to make practical tools. Traditional tool design either relies on simulation or physical analysis, which is often inaccurate and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose…

Robotic cutting, or milling, plays a significant role in applications such as disassembly, decommissioning, and demolition. Planning and control of cutting in real-world scenarios in uncertain environments is a complex task, with the…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

Cooking robots can enhance the home experience by reducing the burden of daily chores. However, these robots must perform their tasks dexterously and safely in shared human environments, especially when handling dangerous tools such as…

This paper tackles the task of singulating and grasping paper-like deformable objects. We refer to such tasks as paper-flipping. In contrast to manipulating deformable objects that lack compression strength (such as shirts and ropes), minor…

In robotic surgery, pattern cutting through a deformable material is a challenging research field. The cutting procedure requires a robot to concurrently manipulate a scissor and a gripper to cut through a predefined contour trajectory on…

Imitation can allow us to quickly gain an understanding of a new task. Through a demonstration, we can gain direct knowledge about which actions need to be performed and which goals they have. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to…

The ability to use random objects as tools in a generalizable manner is a missing piece in robots' intelligence today to boost their versatility and problem-solving capabilities. State-of-the-art robotic tool usage methods focused on…

The skill of pivoting an object with a robotic system is challenging for the external forces that act on the system, mainly given by contact interaction. The complexity increases when the same skills are required to generalize across…

Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small…

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…

When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…

To enable general-purpose robots, we will require the robot to operate daily articulated objects as humans do. Current robot manipulation has heavily relied on using a parallel gripper, which restricts the robot to a limited set of objects.…

This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…

Robotic packaging using wrapping paper poses significant challenges due to the material's complex deformation properties. The packaging process itself involves multiple steps, primarily categorized as folding the paper or creating creases.…

Continuum robots are becoming increasingly popular for applications which require the robots to deform and change shape, while also being compliant. A cable-driven continuum robot is one of the most commonly used type. Typical cable driven…

Tool use, a hallmark feature of human intelligence, remains a challenging problem in robotics due the complex contacts and high-dimensional action space. In this work, we present a novel method to enable reinforcement learning of tool use…

Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…

Automation holds the potential to assist surgeons in robotic interventions, shifting their mental work load from visuomotor control to high level decision making. Reinforcement learning has shown promising results in learning complex…

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…