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Compact robotic platforms with powerful compute and actuation capabilities are key enablers for practical, real-world deployments of multi-agent research. This article introduces a tightly integrated hardware, control, and simulation…
Imitation learning for mobile manipulation is a key challenge in the field of robotic manipulation. However, current mobile manipulation frameworks typically decouple navigation and manipulation, executing manipulation only after reaching a…
We introduce AnyUser, a unified robotic instruction system for intuitive domestic task instruction via free-form sketches on camera images, optionally with language. AnyUser interprets multimodal inputs (sketch, vision, language) as…
Imitation learning is a promising approach for training humanoid robots to both walk and manipulate, but it requires a large number of demonstrations, which are time-intensive and difficult to collect via teleoperation. Existing…
Learning-based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of…
While natural systems often present collective intelligence that allows them to self-organize and adapt to changes, the equivalent is missing in most artificial systems. We explore the possibility of such a system in the context of…
One of the open challenges in designing robots that operate successfully in the unpredictable human environment is how to make them able to predict what actions they can perform on objects, and what their effects will be, i.e., the ability…
We describe a force-controlled robotic gripper with built-in tactile and 3D perception. We also describe a complete autonomous manipulation pipeline consisting of object detection, segmentation, point cloud processing, force-controlled…
Mobile Manipulation (MoMa) systems incorporate the benefits of mobility and dexterity, due to the enlarged space in which they can move and interact with their environment. However, even when equipped with onboard sensors, e.g., an embodied…
An attached arm can significantly increase the applicability of legged robots to several mobile manipulation tasks that are not possible for the wheeled or tracked counterparts. The standard hierarchical control pipeline for such legged…
Imitation Learning is a promising paradigm for learning complex robot manipulation skills by reproducing behavior from human demonstrations. However, manipulation tasks often contain bottleneck regions that require a sequence of precise…
Humanoid robots have the potential to help human workers by realizing physically demanding manipulation tasks such as moving large boxes within warehouses. We define such tasks as Dynamic Mobile Manipulation (DMM). This paper presents a…
Assistive robot arms enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. These arms are dexterous and high-dimensional; however, the interfaces people must use to control their robots are low-dimensional. Consider…
Variable stiffness actuators undergo lower peak force in contacts compared to their rigid counterparts, and are thus safer for human-robot interaction. Furthermore, they can store energy in their elastic element and can release it later to…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
Hand guidance of robots has proven to be a useful tool both for programming trajectories and in kinesthetic teaching. However hand guidance is usually relegated to robots possessing joint-torque sensors (JTS). Here we propose to extend hand…
UMI-style interfaces enable scalable robot learning, but existing systems remain largely visuomotor, relying primarily on RGB observations and trajectory while providing only limited access to physical interaction signals. This becomes a…
Sharing autonomy between robots and human operators could facilitate data collection of robotic task demonstrations to continuously improve learned models. Yet, the means to communicate intent and reason about the future are disparate…
Functional grasp is essential for enabling dexterous multi-finger robot hands to manipulate objects effectively. However, most prior work either focuses on power grasping, which simply involves holding an object still, or relies on costly…
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…