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Grasping has long been considered an important and practical task in robotic manipulation. Yet achieving robust and efficient grasps of diverse objects is challenging, since it involves gripper design, perception, control and learning, etc.…

Dexterous manipulation is limited by both control and design, without consensus as to what makes manipulators best for performing dexterous tasks. This raises a fundamental challenge: how should we design and control robot manipulators that…

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…

When human acquire physical skills (e.g., tennis) from experts, we tend to first learn from merely observing the expert. But this is often insufficient. We then engage in practice, where we try to emulate the expert and ensure that our…

Teleoperation is often limited by the ability of an operator to react and predict the behavior of the robot as it interacts with the environment. For example, to grasp small objects on a table, the teleoperator needs to predict the position…

An impedance-based control scheme is introduced for cooperative manipulators grasping a rigid load. The position and orientation of the load are to be maintained close to a desired trajectory, trading off tracking accuracy by low energy…

Achieving both behavioral similarity and appropriateness in human-like motion generation for humanoid robot remains an open challenge, further compounded by the lack of cross-embodiment adaptability. To address this problem, we propose…

Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…

Human grasps can be roughly categorized into two types: power grasps and precision grasps. Precision grasping enables tool use and is believed to have influenced human evolution. Today's multi-fingered robotic hands are effective in power…

Variable Stiffness Actuators prove invaluable for robotics applications in unstructured environments, fostering safe interactions and enhancing task adaptability. Nevertheless, their mechanical design inevitably results in larger and…

While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…

Humanoid robot technologies have demonstrated immense potential for minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Unlike dedicated multi-arm surgical platforms, the inherent dual-arm configuration of humanoid robots necessitates an efficient instrument…

Recently, there has been a growing interest in rescue robots due to their vital role in addressing emergency scenarios and providing crucial support in challenging or hazardous situations where human intervention is difficult. However, very…

Robots are becoming a vital ingredient in society. Some of their daily tasks require dual-arm manipulation skills in the rapidly changing, dynamic and unpredictable real-world environments where they have to operate. Given the expertise of…

Imitation learning from human demonstrations is an effective means to teach robots manipulation skills. But data acquisition is a major bottleneck in applying this paradigm more broadly, due to the amount of cost and human effort involved.…

Achieving human-level dexterity is an important open problem in robotics. However, tasks of dexterous hand manipulation, even at the baby level, are challenging to solve through reinforcement learning (RL). The difficulty lies in the high…

The impressive capabilities of humans to robustly perform manipulation relies on compliant interactions, enabled through the structure and materials spatially distributed in our hands. We propose by mimicking this distributed compliance in…

Robotic dexterous grasping is a challenging problem due to the high degree of freedom (DoF) and complex contacts of multi-fingered robotic hands. Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods leverage human demonstrations to…

This paper introduces DextAIRity, an approach to manipulate deformable objects using active airflow. In contrast to conventional contact-based quasi-static manipulations, DextAIRity allows the system to apply dense forces on out-of-contact…

We propose a versatile robotic system for kitting and assembly tasks which uses no jigs or commercial tool changers. Instead of specialized end effectors, it uses its two-finger grippers to grasp and hold tools to perform subtasks such as…