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A fundamental challenge of shared autonomy is to use high-DoF robots to assist, rather than hinder, humans by first inferring user intent and then empowering the user to achieve their intent. Although successful, prior methods either rely…
Large Language Models (LLMs) and strong vision models have enabled rapid research and development in the field of Vision-Language-Action models that enable robotic control. The main objective of these methods is to develop a generalist…
Loco-manipulation is a fundamental challenge for humanoid robots to achieve versatile interactions in human environments. Although recent studies have made significant progress in humanoid whole-body control, loco-manipulation remains…
Non-prehensile pushing to move and reorient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In the real world, the object's physical properties and friction with the floor contain significant uncertainties, which makes the task…
Manipulation planning is the task of computing robot trajectories that move a set of objects to their target configuration while satisfying physically feasibility. In contrast to existing works that assume known object templates, we are…
Task specification is at the core of programming autonomous robots. A low-effort modality for task specification is critical for engagement of non-expert end-users and ultimate adoption of personalized robot agents. A widely studied…
The ability of robots to navigate through doors is crucial for their effective operation in indoor environments. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted to develop robots capable of opening specific doors. However, the diverse…
Mobile Manipulation (MoMa) of articulated objects, such as opening doors, drawers, and cupboards, demands simultaneous, whole-body coordination between a robot's base and arms. Classical whole-body controllers (WBCs) can solve such problems…
Large foundation models have shown strong open-world generalization to complex problems in vision and language, but similar levels of generalization have yet to be achieved in robotics. One fundamental challenge is that the models exhibit…
Training vision-based manipulation policies that are robust across diverse visual environments remains an important and unresolved challenge in robot learning. Current approaches often sidestep the problem by relying on invariant…
Research on mobile manipulation systems that physically interact with humans has expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the way to tasks which could not be performed using fixed-base manipulators. Within this context, developing suitable…
This paper introduces a framework for interactive navigation through adaptive non-prehensile mobile manipulation. A key challenge in this process is handling objects with unknown dynamics, which are difficult to infer from visual…
Humans can flexibly interpret and compose different goal specifications, such as language instructions, spatial coordinates, or visual references, when navigating to a destination. In contrast, most existing robotic navigation policies are…
Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models predominantly rely on end-to-end fine-tuning. While effective, this paradigm compromises the inherent generalization capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and incurs catastrophic…
Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different FM integration strategies remain under-explored -- particularly for complex instruction…
A navigable agent needs to understand both high-level semantic instructions and precise spatial perceptions. Building navigation agents centered on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrates a promising solution due to their…
Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong common-sense reasoning abilities, making them promising for robotic navigation and planning tasks. However, despite recent progress, bridging the gap between language…
Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem:…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…