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Understanding and manipulating deformable objects (e.g., ropes and fabrics) is an essential yet challenging task with broad applications. Difficulties come from complex states and dynamics, diverse configurations and high-dimensional action…

This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…

Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…

Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…

The logistics of transporting a package from a storage facility to the consumer's front door usually employs highly specialized robots often times splitting sub-tasks up to different systems, e.g., manipulator arms to sort and wheeled…

This paper introduces a novel and general method to address the problem of using a general-purpose robot manipulator with a parallel gripper to wrap a deformable linear object (DLO), called a rope, around a rigid object, called a rod,…

Manipulating deformable objects in robotic cells is often costly and not widely accessible. However, the use of localized pneumatic gripping systems can enhance accessibility. Current methods that use pneumatic grippers to handle deformable…

Achieving human-like dexterous robotic manipulation remains a central goal and a pivotal challenge in robotics. The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has allowed rapid progress in robotic manipulation. This survey summarizes the…

Robotic grasping of arbitrary objects even in completely known environments still remains a challenging problem. Most previously developed algorithms had focused on fingertip grasp, failing to solve the problem even for fully actuated…

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…

The problem of robotic lime picking is challenging; lime plants have dense foliage which makes it difficult for a robotic arm to grasp a lime without coming in contact with leaves. Existing approaches either do not consider leaves, or treat…

In robotic grasping, objects are often occluded in ungraspable configurations such that no pregrasp pose can be found, eg large flat boxes on the table that can only be grasped from the side. Inspired by humans' bimanual manipulation, eg…

Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and…

Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an…

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…

This paper describes our recent research effort to bring the computer intelligence into the physical world so that robots could perform physically interactive manipulation tasks. Our proposed approach first gives robots the ability to learn…

The progressive prevalence of robots in human-suited environments has given rise to a myriad of object manipulation techniques, in which dexterity plays a paramount role. It is well-established that humans exhibit extraordinary dexterity…

The rapid increase in the development of humanoid robots and customized manufacturing solutions has brought dexterous manipulation to the forefront of modern robotics. Over the past decade, several expensive dexterous hands have come to…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

Robot-assisted feeding requires reliable bite acquisition, a challenging task due to the complex interactions between utensils and food with diverse physical properties. These interactions are further complicated by the temporal variability…