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Planning dual-arm assembly of more than three objects is a challenging Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) problem. The assembly planner shall consider not only the pose constraints of objects and robots, but also the gravitational constraints…

This work explores the use of topological tools for achieving effective non-prehensile manipulation in cluttered, constrained workspaces. In particular, it proposes the use of persistent homology as a guiding principle in identifying the…

This work proposes a robot task planning framework for retrieving a target object in a confined workspace among multiple stacked objects that obstruct the target. The robot can use prehensile picking and in-workspace placing actions. The…

Automation applications are pushing the deployment of many high DoF manipulators in warehouse and manufacturing environments. This has motivated many efforts on optimizing manipulation tasks involving a single arm. Coordinating multiple…

The search heuristics Tabu search and Simulated annealing are commonly used meta-heuristics. The two heuristics have different ways of ensuring diversification. The heuristics can be implemented for solving the stowage planning problem. The…

Neural implicit mapping has emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic navigation and scene understanding. However, real-world robotic deployment requires continual adaptation to changing environments under strict memory and computation…

We present YORO - a multi-modal transformer encoder-only architecture for the Visual Grounding (VG) task. This task involves localizing, in an image, an object referred via natural language. Unlike the recent trend in the literature of…

This paper proposes a new robust optimization (RO) formulation namely the RO under objective functional uncertainty (ObRO). The ObRO adopts a min-max structure where the inner problem finds the worst-case objective function in a continuous…

Stiff dynamical systems present a challenge for machine-learning reduced-order models (ML-ROMs), as explicit time integration becomes unstable in stiff regimes while implicit integration within learning loops is computationally expensive…

Task-oriented object detection (TOOD) atop CLIP offers open-vocabulary, prompt-driven semantics, yet dense per-window computation and heavy memory traffic hinder real-time, power-limited edge deployment. We present \emph{TorR}, a…

We present ROBO (Riemannian Overlapping Block Optimization), a distributed and parallel approach to multi-robot pose graph optimization (PGO) based on the idea of overlapping domain decomposition. ROBO offers a middle ground between…

We present the "Busboy Problem": automating an efficient decluttering of cups, bowls, and silverware from a planar surface. As grasping and transporting individual items is highly inefficient, we propose policies to generate grasps for…

Robotic grasping in cluttered environments remains a significant challenge due to occlusions and complex object arrangements. We have developed ThinkGrasp, a plug-and-play vision-language grasping system that makes use of GPT-4o's advanced…

This paper proposes a framework for improving the operational efficiency of automated storage systems under uncertainty. It considers a 2D grid-based storage for uniform-sized loads (e.g., containers, pallets, or totes), which are moved by…

We study the problem of placing a grasped object on an empty flat surface in an upright orientation, such as placing a cup on its bottom rather than on its side. We aim to find the required object rotation such that when the gripper is…

This paper addresses the challenge of occluded robot grasping, i.e. grasping in situations where the desired grasp poses are kinematically infeasible due to environmental constraints such as surface collisions. Traditional robot…

Dexterous robotic manipulation remains a longstanding challenge in robotics due to the high dimensionality of control spaces and the semantic complexity of object interaction. In this paper, we propose an object affordance-guided…

Buffer zones are essential in production systems to decouple sequential processes. In dense floor storage environments, such as space-constrained brownfield facilities, manual operation is increasingly challenged by severe labor shortages…

The unrestricted block relocation problem is an important optimization problem encountered at terminals, where containers are stored in stacks. It consists in determining the minimum number of container moves so as to empty the considered…

Balancing competing objectives is omnipresent across disciplines, from drug design to autonomous systems. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization is a promising solution for such expensive, black-box problems: it fits probabilistic surrogates…