Related papers: Robot Learning with Sparsity and Scarcity

Robots which interact with the physical world will benefit from a fine-grained tactile understanding of objects and surfaces. Additionally, for certain tasks, robots may need to know the haptic properties of an object before touching it. To…

Tactile information plays a critical role in human dexterity. It reveals useful contact information that may not be inferred directly from vision. In fact, humans can even perform in-hand dexterous manipulation without using vision. Can we…

Tactile perception is important for robotic systems that interact with the world through touch. Touch is an active sense in which tactile measurements depend on the contact properties of an interaction--e.g., velocity, force,…

One of the first tasks we learn as children is to grasp objects based on our tactile perception. Incorporating such skill in robots will enable multiple applications, such as increasing flexibility in industrial processes or providing…

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…

In the human hand, high-density contact information provided by afferent neurons is essential for many human grasping and manipulation capabilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors, including the state-of-the-art SynTouch BioTac, are…

Robotic tactile perception is a complex process involving several computational steps performed at different levels. Tactile information is shaped by the interplay of robot actions, the mechanical properties of its body, and the software…

Tools extend the manipulation abilities of robots, much like they do for humans. Despite human expertise in tool manipulation, teaching robots these skills faces challenges. The complexity arises from the interplay of two simultaneous…

Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…

Motivated by the astonishing capabilities of natural intelligent agents and inspired by theories from psychology, this paper explores the idea that perception gets coupled to 3D properties of the world via interaction with the environment.…

Mobile manipulators are increasingly deployed in complex environments, requiring diverse sensors to perceive and interact with their surroundings. However, equipping every robot with every possible sensor is often impractical due to cost…

Learning long-horizon manipulation tasks efficiently is a central challenge in robot learning from demonstration. Unlike recent endeavors that focus on directly learning the task in the action domain, we focus on inferring what the robot…

Tactile information is important for gripping, stable grasp, and in-hand manipulation, yet the complexity of tactile data prevents widespread use of such sensors. We make use of an unsupervised learning algorithm that transforms the complex…

Precise robotic grasping of several novel objects is a huge challenge in manufacturing, automation, and logistics. Most of the current methods for model-free grasping are disadvantaged by the sparse data in grasping datasets and by errors…

Robots in many real-world settings have access to force/torque sensors in their gripper and tactile sensing is often necessary in tasks that involve contact-rich motion. In this work, we leverage surprise from mismatches in touch feedback…

When training data is sparse, more domain knowledge must be incorporated into the learning algorithm in order to reduce the effective size of the hypothesis space. This paper builds on previous work in which knowledge about qualitative…

Batteryless or so called passive wearables are providing new and innovative methods for human activity recognition (HAR), especially in healthcare applications for older people. Passive sensors are low cost, lightweight, unobtrusive and…

High-resolution optical tactile sensors are increasingly used in robotic learning environments due to their ability to capture large amounts of data directly relating to agent-environment interaction. However, there is a high barrier of…

Humans can achieve diverse in-hand manipulations, such as object pinching and tool use, which often involve simultaneous contact between the object and multiple fingers. This is still an open issue for robotic hands because such dexterous…

Regulating grasping force to reduce slippage during dynamic object interaction remains a fundamental challenge in robotic manipulation, especially when objects are manipulated by multiple rolling contacts, have unknown properties (such as…