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Continuum robots have been widely adopted in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) because of their compact size and high flexibility. However, their proprioceptive capabilities remain limited, particularly in narrow lumens,…
This paper presents a novel contact-implicit trajectory optimization method using an analytically solvable contact model to enable planning of interactions with hard, soft, and slippery environments. Specifically, we propose a novel contact…
Incorporating accurate physics-based simulation into interactive design tools is challenging. However, adding the physics accurately becomes crucial to several emerging technologies. For example, in virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) videos,…
The capability to adapt compliance by varying muscle stiffness is crucial for dexterous manipulation skills in humans. Incorporating compliance in robot motor control is crucial to performing real-world force interaction tasks with…
Medical robotics can help improve and extend the reach of healthcare services. A major challenge for medical robots is the complex physical interaction between the robot and the patients which is required to be safe. This work presents the…
Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
In the field of robotic manipulation, the proficiency of deformable object manipulation lags behind human capabilities due to the inherent characteristics of deformable objects. These objects have infinite degrees of freedom, resulting in…
Simulation modeling of robots, objects, and environments is the backbone for all model-based control and learning. It is leveraged broadly across dynamic programming and model-predictive control, as well as data generation for imitation,…
A new computer haptics algorithm to be used in general interactive manipulations of deformable virtual objects is presented. In multimodal interactive simulations, haptic feedback computation often comes from contact forces. Subsequently,…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
A realistic simulation environment is an essential tool in every roboticist's toolkit, with uses ranging from planning and control to training policies with reinforcement learning. Despite the centrality of simulation in modern robotics,…
We present a novel solution to the problem of simulation-to-real transfer, which builds on recent advances in robot skill decomposition. Rather than focusing on minimizing the simulation-reality gap, we learn a set of diverse policies that…
We present an enhanced immersed interface method for simulating incompressible fluid flows in thin gaps between closely spaced immersed boundaries. This regime, common in engineered structures such as including tribological interfaces and…
State-of-the-art object pose estimation methods are prone to generating geometrically infeasible pose hypotheses. This problem is prevalent in dexterous manipulation, where estimated poses often intersect with the robotic hand or are not…
Accurate deformable object manipulation (DOM) is essential for achieving autonomy in robotic surgery, where soft tissues are being displaced, stretched, and dissected. Many DOM methods can be powered by simulation, which ensures realistic…
In sim-to-real Reinforcement Learning (RL), a policy is trained in a simulated environment and then deployed on the physical system. The main challenge of sim-to-real RL is to overcome the reality gap - the discrepancies between the real…
Mechanical interactions between rigid rings and flexible cables find broad application in both daily life (hanging clothes) and engineering systems (closing a tether-net). A reduced-order method for the dynamic analysis of sliding rings on…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…
Control techniques like MPC can realize contact-rich manipulation which exploits dynamic information, maintaining friction limits and safety constraints. However, contact geometry and dynamics are required to be known. This information is…