Related papers: FTACT: Force Torque aware Action Chunking Transfor…
In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from…
Memory-augmented robotic policies are essential in handling memory-dependent tasks. However, existing approaches typically rely on simple observation window extensions, struggling to simultaneously achieve precise task state tracking and…
Magnetically actuated robots provide a promising untethered platform for navigation in confined environments, enabling biological studies and targeted micro-delivery. However, dexterous manipulation in complex structures remains…
Optimal Control for legged robots has gone through a paradigm shift from position-based to torque-based control, owing to the latter's compliant and robust nature. In parallel to this shift, the community has also turned to Deep…
Most robot manipulation focuses on changing the kinematic state of objects: picking, placing, opening, or rotating them. However, a wide range of real-world manipulation tasks involve a different class of object state change--such as…
Robots need to manipulate objects in constrained environments like shelves and cabinets when assisting humans in everyday settings like homes and offices. These constraints make manipulation difficult by reducing grasp accessibility, so…
Autonomous fabric manipulation is a longstanding challenge in robotics, but evaluating progress is difficult due to the cost and diversity of robot hardware. Using Reach, a cloud robotics platform that enables low-latency remote execution…
Accurate shape reconstruction of transparent objects is a challenging task due to their non-Lambertian surfaces and yet necessary for robots for accurate pose perception and safe manipulation. As vision-based sensing can produce erroneous…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
We explore how intermediate policy representations can facilitate generalization by providing guidance on how to perform manipulation tasks. Existing representations such as language, goal images, and trajectory sketches have been shown to…
Contact force in contact-rich environments is an essential modality for robots to perform general-purpose manipulation tasks, as it provides information to compensate for the deficiencies of visual and proprioceptive data in collision…
Robot picking and packing tasks require dexterous manipulation skills, such as rearranging objects to establish a good grasping pose, or placing and pushing items to achieve tight packing. These tasks are challenging for robots due to the…
The advent of tactile sensors in robotics has sparked many ideas on how robots can leverage direct contact measurements of their environment interactions to improve manipulation tasks. An important line of research in this regard is that of…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable generalization by mapping web-scale knowledge to robotic control, yet they remain blind to physical contact. Consequently, they struggle with contact-rich manipulation tasks that…
Leveraging sensing modalities across diverse spatial and temporal resolutions can improve performance of robotic manipulation tasks. Multi-spatial resolution sensing provides hierarchical information captured at different spatial scales and…
Learning from demonstrations is a promising paradigm for transferring knowledge to robots. However, learning mobile manipulation tasks directly from a human teacher is a complex problem as it requires learning models of both the overall…
Learning visuomotor policy for multi-task robotic manipulation has been a long-standing challenge for the robotics community. The difficulty lies in the diversity of action space: typically, a goal can be accomplished in multiple ways,…
We present a learnable physics-based predictive model that provides accurate motion and force-torque prediction of the robot end effector in contact-rich manipulation. The proposed model extends the state-of-the-art GNN-based simulator…
Learning robotic manipulation policies through supervised learning from demonstrations remains challenging when policies encounter execution variations not explicitly covered during training. While incorporating historical context through…
In teleoperation, research has mainly focused on target approaching, where we deal with the more challenging object manipulation task by advancing the shared control technique. Appropriately manipulating an object is challenging due to the…