Related papers: MorphIt: Flexible Spherical Approximation of Robot…
Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…
Bagging tasks, commonly found in industrial scenarios, are challenging considering deformable bags' complicated and unpredictable nature. This paper presents an automated bagging system from the proposed adaptive Structure-of-Interest (SOI)…
Developing robot agnostic software frameworks involves synthesizing the disparate fields of robotic theory and software engineering while simultaneously accounting for a large variability in hardware designs and control paradigms. As the…
An emerging theme across many domains of science and engineering is materials that change shape, often dramatically. Determining their structure involves solving a shape optimization problem where a given energy functional is minimized with…
Many robotic tasks involving some form of 3D visual perception greatly benefit from a complete knowledge of the working environment. However, robots often have to tackle unstructured environments and their onboard visual sensors can only…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
Visual actionable affordance has emerged as a transformative approach in robotics, focusing on perceiving interaction areas prior to manipulation. Traditional methods rely on pixel sampling to identify successful interaction samples or…
Robot appearance crucially shapes Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) but is typically described via broad categories like anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or technical. More precise approaches focus almost exclusively on anthropomorphic features,…
Robotic manipulation of unfamiliar objects in new environments is challenging and requires extensive training or laborious pre-programming. We propose a new skill transfer framework, which enables a robot to transfer complex object…
Robots are traditionally bounded by a fixed embodiment during their operational lifetime, which limits their ability to adapt to their surroundings. Co-optimizing control and morphology of a robot, however, is often inefficient due to the…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Integrating Large Language Models (VLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with robotic systems enables robots to process and understand complex natural language instructions and visual information. However, a fundamental challenge remains:…
Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…
Soft robotic grippers are essential for grasping delicate, geometrically complex objects in manufacturing, healthcare and agriculture. However, existing grippers struggle to grasp feature-rich objects with high topological variability,…
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Whereas naturally occurring swarms thrive when crowded, physical interactions in robotic swarms are either avoided or carefully controlled, thus limiting their operational density. Here we present a mechanical design rule that allows robots…
The robotic manipulation of compliant objects is currently one of the most active problems in robotics due to its potential to automate many important applications. Despite the progress achieved by the robotics community in recent years,…
Robot learning requires a considerable amount of high-quality data to realize the promise of generalization. However, large data sets are costly to collect in the real world. Physics simulators can cheaply generate vast data sets with broad…
Designing robots by hand can be costly and time consuming, especially if the robots have to be created with novel materials, or be robust to internal or external changes. In order to create robots automatically, without the need for human…