Related papers: Pushing Everything Everywhere All At Once: Probabi…
We present a unified approach for constraint displacement problems in which a robot finds a feasible path by displacing constraints or obstacles. To this end, we propose a two stage process that returns locally optimal obstacle…
In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…
Motion planning for articulated robots has traditionally been governed by algorithms that operate within manufacturer-defined payload limits. Our empirical analysis of the Franka Emika Panda robot demonstrates that this approach…
It is desirable for future robots to quickly learn new tasks and adapt learned skills to constantly changing environments. To this end, Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMPs) have shown to be a promising framework to learn generalizable…
Empowerment quantifies the influence an agent has on its environment. This is formally achieved by the maximum of the expected KL-divergence between the distribution of the successor state conditioned on a specific action and a distribution…
As robot make their way out of factories into human environments, outer space, and beyond, they require the skill to manipulate their environment in multifarious, unforeseeable circumstances. With this regard, pushing is an essential motion…
Robotic pick-and-place (PnP) operations on moving conveyors find a wide range of industrial applications. In practice, simple greedy heuristics (e.g., prioritization based on the time to process a single object) are applied that achieve…
Picking diverse objects in the real world is a fundamental robotics skill. However, many objects in such settings are bulky, heavy, or irregularly shaped, making them ungraspable by conventional end effectors like suction grippers and…
In this paper, we address the problem of embedded feature selection for ranking on top of the list problems. We pose this problem as a regularized empirical risk minimization with $p$-norm push loss function ($p=\infty$) and sparsity…
Path planning in dynamic environments is essential to high-risk applications such as unmanned aerial vehicles, self-driving cars, and autonomous underwater vehicles. In this paper, we generate collision-free trajectories for a robot within…
A key challenge in robotics is the efficient generation of optimal robot motion with safety guarantees in cluttered environments. Recently, deterministic optimal sampling-based motion planners have been shown to achieve good performance…
Global optimization is a challenging problem, with plenty of algorithms displaying empirical success, but scarce theoretical backing. In this work, we propose a new theoretical framework called Proximal Basin Hopping (PBH), carefully…
We describe a novel algorithm for rounding packing integer programs based on multidimensional Brownian motion in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Starting from an optimal fractional feasible solution $\bar{x}$, the procedure converges in polynomial time to…
Probabilistic control design is founded on the principle that a rational agent attempts to match modelled with an arbitrary desired closed-loop system trajectory density. The framework was originally proposed as a tractable alternative to…
Real-world environments are inherently uncertain, and to operate safely in these environments robots must be able to plan around this uncertainty. In the context of motion planning, we desire systems that can maintain an acceptable level of…
In this paper we propose an approach for efficient grasp selection for manipulation tasks of unknown objects. Even for simple tasks such as pick-and-place, a unique solution is rare to occur. Rather, multiple candidate grasps must be…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is folding a garment autonomously. Given start and end folding positions, what is an optimal trajectory to move the robotic arm to fold a garment? Certain…
Grasping an object when it is in an ungraspable pose is a challenging task, such as books or other large flat objects placed horizontally on a table. Inspired by human manipulation, we address this problem by pushing the object to the edge…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
We consider the problem of grasping in clutter. While there have been motion planners developed to address this problem in recent years, these planners are mostly tailored for open-loop execution. Open-loop execution in this domain,…