Related papers: RICE: Reactive Interaction Controller for Cluttere…
Reactive control is often considered insufficient for multi-objective tasks because conflicting objectives give rise to local minima. We argue this limitation is not inherent but arises from static encodings that fail to reflect how…
Grasping in a densely cluttered environment is a challenging task for robots. Previous methods tried to solve this problem by actively gathering multiple views before grasp pose generation. However, they either overlooked the importance of…
A key challenge in contact-rich dexterous manipulation is the need to jointly reason over geometry, kinematic constraints, and intricate, nonsmooth contact dynamics. End-to-end visuomotor policies bypass this structure, but often require…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…
Robots often face manipulation tasks in environments where vision is inadequate due to clutter, occlusions, or poor lighting--for example, reaching a shutoff valve at the back of a sink cabinet or locating a light switch above a crowded…
Robotic tasks involving contact interactions pose significant challenges for trajectory optimization due to discontinuous dynamics. Conventional formulations typically assume deterministic contact events, which limit robustness and…
Modern two and four legged robots exhibit impressive mobility on complex terrain, largely attributed to advancement in learning algorithms. However, these systems often rely on high-bandwidth sensing and onboard computation to…
Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar…
Interactive navigation is crucial in scenarios where proactively interacting with objects can yield shorter paths, thus significantly improving traversal efficiency. Existing methods primarily focus on using the robot body to relocate large…
Navigation strategies that intentionally incorporate contact with humans (i.e. "contact-based" social navigation) in crowded environments are largely unexplored even though collision-free social navigation is a well studied problem.…
Although, in the task of grasping via a data-driven method, closed-loop feedback and predicting 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) grasp rather than conventionally used 4DoF top-down grasp are demonstrated to improve performance individually, few…
Autonomous navigation in dense traffic scenarios remains challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs) because the intentions of other drivers are not directly observable and AVs have to deal with a wide range of driving behaviors. To maneuver…
Grasping a novel target object in constrained environments (e.g., walls, bins, and shelves) requires intensive reasoning about grasp pose reachability to avoid collisions with the surrounding structures. Typical 6-DoF robotic grasping…
Designing robotic assistance devices for manipulation tasks is challenging. This work is concerned with improving accuracy and usability of semi-autonomous robots, such as human operated manipulators or exoskeletons. The key insight is to…
Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…
For successful object manipulation with robotic hands, it is important to ensure that the object remains in the grasp at all times. In addition to grasp constraints associated with slipping and singular hand configurations, excessive…
In densely cluttered environments, physical interference, visual occlusions, and unstable contacts often cause direct dexterous grasping to fail, while aggressive singulation strategies may compromise safety. Enabling robots to adaptively…
Grasping using an aerial robot can have many applications ranging from infrastructure inspection and maintenance to precise agriculture. However, aerial grasping is a challenging problem since the robot has to maintain an accurate position…
We describe a system for visually guided autonomous navigation of under-canopy farm robots. Low-cost under-canopy robots can drive between crop rows under the plant canopy and accomplish tasks that are infeasible for over-the-canopy drones…