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Many industries extensively use flexible materials. Effective approaches for handling flexible objects with a robot manipulator must address residual vibrations. Existing solutions rely on complex models, use additional instrumentation for…
The control of robots for manipulation tasks generally relies on visual input. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) enable the use of natural language instructions to condition visual input and control robots in a wider range of…
It is becoming increasingly important for machine learning methods to make predictions that are interpretable as well as accurate. In many practical applications, it is of interest which features and feature interactions are relevant to the…
Deformable object manipulation requires computationally efficient representations that are compatible with robotic sensing modalities. In this paper, we present VIRDO:an implicit, multi-modal, and continuous representation for…
Learning object manipulation is a critical skill for robots to interact with their environment. Even though there has been significant progress in robotic manipulation of rigid objects, interacting with non-rigid objects remains challenging…
Accurately assessing the potential value of new sensor observations is a critical aspect of planning for active perception. This task is particularly challenging when reasoning about high-level scene understanding using measurements from…
The vast majority of visual animals actively control their eyes, heads, and/or bodies to direct their gaze toward different parts of their environment. In contrast, recent applications of reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation…
Timber represents an increasingly valuable and versatile resource. However, forestry operations such as harvesting, handling and measuring logs still require substantial human labor in remote environments posing significant safety risks.…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a challenging task for a robot. It will be problematic to use a single sensory input to track the behaviour of such objects: vision can be subjected to occlusions, whereas tactile inputs cannot capture…
Autonomous mobile service robots, like lawnmowers or cleaning robots, operating in human-populated environments need to reason about local human-human interactions to support safe and socially aware navigation while fulfilling their tasks.…
The ability to both recognize and discover terrain characteristics is an important function required for many autonomous ground robots such as social robots, assistive robots, autonomous vehicles, and ground exploration robots. Recognizing…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and…
The complex physical properties of highly deformable materials such as clothes pose significant challenges fanipulation systems. We present a novel visual feedback dictionary-based method for manipulating defoor autonomous robotic mrmable…
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…
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…
We propose to use a simulation driven inverse inference approach to model the dynamics of tree branches under manipulation. Learning branch dynamics and gaining the ability to manipulate deformable vegetation can help with occlusion-prone…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We…