Related papers: Dynamic Non-Prehensile Object Transport via Model-…

Reinforcement learning (RL) often necessitates a meticulous Markov Decision Process (MDP) design tailored to each task. This work aims to address this challenge by proposing a systematic approach to behavior synthesis and control for…

Non-prehensile object transportation offers a way to enhance robotic performance in object manipulation tasks, especially with unstable objects. Effective trajectory planning requires simultaneous consideration of robot motion constraints…

Although robotic applications increasingly demand versatile and dynamic object handling, most existing techniques are predominantly focused on grasp-based manipulation, limiting their applicability in non-prehensile tasks. To address this…

With the continual adoption of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) across a wide-variety of application spaces, robust aerial manipulation remains a key research challenge. Aerial manipulation tasks require interacting with objects in the…

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Non-prehensile pushing to move and reorient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In the real world, the object's physical properties and friction with the floor contain significant uncertainties, which makes the task…

Current end-to-end deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches require jointly learning perception, decision-making and low-level control from very sparse reward signals and high-dimensional inputs, with little capability of incorporating…

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…

Robotic collaborative carrying could greatly benefit human activities like warehouse and construction site management. However, coordinating the simultaneous motion of multiple robots represents a significant challenge. Existing works…

Modelling of contact-rich tasks is challenging and cannot be entirely solved using classical control approaches due to the difficulty of constructing an analytic description of the contact dynamics. Additionally, in a manipulation task like…

Rearranging objects on a tabletop surface by means of nonprehensile manipulation is a task which requires skillful interaction with the physical world. Usually, this is achieved by precisely modeling physical properties of the objects,…

Robotic manipulation can be formulated as inducing a sequence of spatial displacements: where the space being moved can encompass an object, part of an object, or end effector. In this work, we propose the Transporter Network, a simple…

We present a framework for data-driven robotics that makes use of a large dataset of recorded robot experience and scales to several tasks using learned reward functions. We show how to apply this framework to accomplish three different…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex robotic skills from raw sensory inputs, but have yet to achieve the kind of broad generalization and applicability demonstrated by deep learning methods in supervised domains. We…

Autonomous navigation capabilities play a critical role in service robots operating in environments where human interactions are pivotal, due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of these environments. However, the variability in human…

In this paper, we study the implementation of a model predictive controller (MPC) for the task of object manipulation in a highly uncertain environment (e.g., picking objects from a semi-flexible array of densely packed bins). As a…

Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not…

Nonprehensile manipulation is essential for manipulating objects that are too thin, large, or otherwise ungraspable in the wild. To sidestep the difficulty of contact modeling in conventional modeling-based approaches, reinforcement…

Motion Cueing Algorithms (MCAs) encode the movement of simulated vehicles into movement that can be reproduced with a motion simulator to provide a realistic driving experience within the capabilities of the machine. This paper introduces a…

Robotic manipulators are essential for precise industrial pick-and-place operations, yet planning collision-free trajectories in dynamic environments remains challenging due to uncertainties such as sensor noise and time-varying delays.…