Related papers: A Contact-Driven Framework for Manipulating in the…
Navigating dynamic and unstructured environments poses significant challenges for autonomous robots, particularly due to the uncertainty introduced by occluded areas. Conventional sensing methods often fail to detect obstacles hidden behind…
Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar…
A particular type of assistive robots designed for physical interaction with objects could play an important role assisting with mobility and fall prevention in healthcare facilities. Autonomous mobile manipulation presents a hurdle prior…
Robots operating in unstructured environments face significant challenges when interacting with everyday objects like doors. They particularly struggle to generalize across diverse door types and conditions. Existing vision-based and…
This paper presents a Human-Robot Blind Handover architecture within the context of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). The focus lies on a blind handover scenario where the operator is intentionally faced away, focused in a task, and requires…
Robots operating in unstructured human environments inevitably encounter failures, especially in robot caregiving scenarios. While humans can often help robots recover, excessive or poorly targeted queries impose unnecessary cognitive and…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Mobile robots in unstructured, mapless environments must rely on an obstacle avoidance module to navigate safely. The standard avoidance techniques estimate the locations of obstacles with respect to the robot but are unaware of the…
Collaborative robots are expected to be able to work alongside humans and in some cases directly replace existing human workers, thus effectively responding to rapid assembly line changes. Current methods for programming contact-rich tasks,…
Continuum robots are well suited for navigating confined and fragile environments, such as vascular or endoluminal anatomy, where contact with surrounding structures is often unavoidable. While controlled contact can assist motion,…
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…
Motion planning involves determining a sequence of robot configurations to reach a desired pose, subject to movement and safety constraints. Traditional motion planning finds collision-free paths, but this is overly restrictive in clutter,…
Non-prehensile manipulation methods usually use a simple end effector, e.g., a single rod, to manipulate the object. Compared to the grasping method, such an end effector is compact and flexible, and hence it can perform tasks in a…
We present an approach to robotic manipulation of unknown objects through regulation of the object's contact configuration: the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the object, robot, and environment. A contact configuration…
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…
Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception…
In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to…
This paper presents a novel layered framework that integrates visual foundation models to improve robot manipulation tasks and motion planning. The framework consists of five layers: Perception, Cognition, Planning, Execution, and Learning.…
We present a control framework that enables humanoid robots to perform collaborative transportation tasks with a human partner. The framework supports both translational and rotational motions, which are fundamental to co-transport…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…