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Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined…
Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the…
Existing shape estimation methods for deformable object manipulation suffer from the drawbacks of being off-line, model dependent, noise-sensitive or occlusion-sensitive, and thus are not appropriate for manipulation tasks requiring high…
Dual-arm manipulation is an area of growing interest in the robotics community. Enabling robots to perform tasks that require the coordinated use of two arms, is essential for complex manipulation tasks such as handling large objects,…
This paper proposes a unified vision-based manipulation framework using image contours of deformable/rigid objects. Instead of using human-defined cues, the robot automatically learns the features from processed vision data. Our method…
Bagging tasks, commonly found in industrial scenarios, are challenging considering deformable bags' complicated and unpredictable nature. This paper presents an automated bagging system from the proposed adaptive Structure-of-Interest (SOI)…
Robot hands that imitate the shape of the human body have been actively studied, and various materials and mechanisms have been proposed to imitate the human body. Although the use of soft materials is advantageous in that it can imitate…
Autonomous robotic surgery has the potential to provide efficacy, safety, and consistency independent of individual surgeons skill and experience. Autonomous soft-tissue surgery in unstructured and deformable environments is especially…
A vacuum lifter is widely used to hold and pick up large, heavy, and flat objects. Conventionally, when using a vacuum lifter, a human worker watches the state of a running vacuum lifter and adjusts the object's pose to maintain balance. In…
A key challenge in intelligent robotics is creating robots that are capable of directly interacting with the world around them to achieve their goals. The last decade has seen substantial growth in research on the problem of robot…
Flexible object manipulation of paper and cloth is a major research challenge in robot manipulation. Although there have been efforts to develop hardware that enables specific actions and to realize a single action of paper folding using…
One important vision of robotics is to provide physical assistance by manipulating different everyday objects, e.g., hand tools, kitchen utensils. However, many objects designed for dexterous hand-control are not easily manipulable by a…
Adaptation to various scene configurations and object properties, stability and dexterity in robotic grasping manipulation is far from explored. This work presents an origami-based shape morphing fingertip design to actively tackle the…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
This paper presents a method for constrained motion planning from vision, which enables a robot to move its end-effector over an observed surface, given start and destination points. The robot has no prior knowledge of the surface shape,…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and sim-to-real transfer have advanced rigid-object manipulation. However, policies remain brittle for articulated mechanisms due to contact-rich dynamics that require both stable grasping and simultaneous free…
This paper presents Yummy Operations Robot Initiative (YORI), a proprioceptive dual-arm robotic system that demonstrates autonomous multi-dish cooking for scalable food service applications. YORI integrates a dual-arm manipulator equipped…
The ability of robotic grippers to not only grasp but also re-position and re-orient objects in-hand is crucial for achieving versatile, general-purpose manipulation. While recent advances in soft robotic grasping has greatly improved grasp…
Deformable object manipulation presents a unique set of challenges in robotic manipulation by exhibiting high degrees of freedom and severe self-occlusion. State representation for materials that exhibit plastic behavior, like modeling clay…