Related papers: Self-Sensing for Proprioception and Contact Detect…
Collision-free motion is often aided by tactile and proximity sensors distributed on the body of the robot due to their resistance to occlusion as opposed to external cameras. However, how to shape the sensor's properties, such as sensing…
Tactile perception is central to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. However, it requires contact, and a mature implementation must infer object models while also accounting for the motion induced by the interaction. In this…
Underactuated soft robot hands offer inherent safety and adaptability advantages over rigid systems, but developing dexterous manipulation skills remains challenging. While imitation learning shows promise for complex manipulation tasks,…
In robotic grasping, objects are often occluded in ungraspable configurations such that no pregrasp pose can be found, eg large flat boxes on the table that can only be grasped from the side. Inspired by humans' bimanual manipulation, eg…
We provide a method for detecting and localizing objects near a robot arm using arm-mounted miniature time-of-flight sensors. A key challenge when using arm-mounted sensors is differentiating between the robot itself and external objects in…
This work develops a learning-based contact estimator for legged robots that bypasses the need for physical sensors and takes multi-modal proprioceptive sensory data as input. Unlike vision-based state estimators, proprioceptive state…
Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable…
This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantees, and…
Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…
We introduce a model for monocular RGB relative pose estimation of a ground robot that trains from scratch without pose labels nor prior knowledge about the robot's shape or appearance. At training time, we assume: (i) a robot fitted with…
Accurate depth estimation remains an open problem for robotic manipulation; even state of the art techniques including structured light and LiDAR sensors fail on reflective or transparent surfaces. We address this problem by training a…
A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a…
We present a novel approach for mobile manipulator self-calibration using contact information. Our method, based on point cloud registration, is applied to estimate the extrinsic transform between a fixed vision sensor mounted on a mobile…
To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose…
Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…
Human-robot collaboration requires the establishment of methods to guarantee the safety of participating operators. A necessary part of this process is ensuring reliable human pose estimation. Established vision-based modalities encounter…
Despite advances in a diversity of environments, snake robots are still far behind snakes in traversing complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles. This is due to a lack of understanding of how to control 3-D body bending to push against…
With robots becoming increasingly prevalent in various domains, it has become crucial to equip them with tools to achieve greater fluency in interactions with humans. One of the promising areas for further exploration lies in human trust. A…
Wearable medical technology has become increasingly popular in recent years. One function of wearable health devices is stress detection, which relies on sensor inputs to determine the mental state of patients. This continuous, real-time…
The flexible under-actuated musculoskeletal hand is superior in its adaptability and impact resistance. On the other hand, since the relationship between sensors and actuators cannot be uniquely determined, almost all its controls are based…