Related papers: Exciting Contact Modes in Differentiable Simulatio…
Optimal estimation is a promising tool for estimation of payloads' inertial parameters and localization of robots in the presence of multiple contacts. To harness its advantages in robotics, it is crucial to solve these large and…
The large demand for simulated data has made the reality gap a problem on the forefront of robotics. We propose a method to traverse the gap by tuning available simulation parameters. Through the optimisation of physics engine parameters,…
Predicting the outcomes of robotic actions, often referred to as learning a world model, in complex environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual observations and action inputs to…
Accurately modeling contact behaviors for real-world, near-rigid materials remains a grand challenge for existing rigid-body physics simulators. This paper introduces a data-augmented contact model that incorporates analytical solutions…
The ability to reason about and predict the outcome of contacts is paramount to the successful execution of many robot tasks. Analytical rigid-body contact models are used extensively in planning and control due to their computational…
Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
Sim-to-real discrepancies hinder learning-based policies from achieving high-precision tasks in the real world. While Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used to bridge this gap, it often relies on heuristics and can lead to overly…
In this paper, we discuss a framework for teaching bimanual manipulation tasks by imitation. To this end, we present a system and algorithms for learning compliant and contact-rich robot behavior from human demonstrations. The presented…
The future will be replete with scenarios where humans are robots will be working together in complex environments. Teammates interact, and the robot's interaction has to be about getting useful information about the human's (teammate's)…
We present a general approach for controlling robotic systems that make and break contact with their environments. Contact-implicit model predictive control (CI-MPC) generalizes linear MPC to contact-rich settings by utilizing a bi-level…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. This physical interaction takes multiple forms depending on the task, the user, and what the robot has learned so far. State-of-the-art approaches focus on learning from a single…
Many robotic tasks in real-world environments require physical interactions with an object such as pick up or push. For successful interactions, the robot needs to know the object's affordances, which are defined as the potential actions…
Robust manipulation often hinges on a robot's ability to perceive extrinsic contacts-contacts between a grasped object and its surrounding environment. However, these contacts are difficult to observe through vision alone due to occlusions,…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
This paper investigates deception in the context of motion using a simulated mobile robot. We analyze some previously designed deceptive strategies on a mobile robot simulator. We then present a novel approach to adaptively choose…
For non-robot-programming experts, kinesthetic guiding can be an intuitive input method, as robot programming of in-contact tasks is becoming more prominent. However, imprecise and noisy input signals from human demonstrations pose problems…
The paper presents a complete pipeline for learning continuous motion control policies for a mobile robot when only a non-differentiable physics simulator of robot-terrain interactions is available. The multi-modal state estimation of the…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…