Related papers: PushingBots: Collaborative Pushing via Neural Acce…

Multi-agent systems can be extremely efficient when working concurrently and collaboratively, e.g., for transportation, maintenance, search and rescue. Coordination of such teams often involves two aspects: (i) selecting appropriate…

This paper considers the problem of rearrangement planning, i.e finding a sequence of manipulation actions that displace multiple objects from an initial configuration to a given goal configuration. Rearrangement is a critical skill for…

While natural systems often present collective intelligence that allows them to self-organize and adapt to changes, the equivalent is missing in most artificial systems. We explore the possibility of such a system in the context of…

Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…

Pushing objects through cluttered scenes is a challenging task, especially when the objects to be pushed have initially unknown dynamics and touching other entities has to be avoided to reduce the risk of damage. In this paper, we approach…

Non-prehensile manipulation such as pushing is typically subject to uncertain, non-smooth dynamics. However, modeling the uncertainty of the dynamics typically results in intractable belief dynamics, making data-efficient planning under…

Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…

Robot manipulation in cluttered environments often requires complex and sequential rearrangement of multiple objects in order to achieve the desired reconfiguration of the target objects. Due to the sophisticated physical interactions…

Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in environments that are only partially observable, executing…

Efficient tabletop rearrangement remains challenging due to collisions and the need for temporary buffering when target poses are obstructed. Prehensile pick-and-place provides precise control but often requires extra moves, whereas…

We focus on the problem of rearranging a set of objects with a team of car-like robot pushers built using off-the-shelf components. Maintaining control of pushed objects while avoiding collisions in a tight space demands highly coordinated…

We present a planning and control approach for collaborative transportation of objects in space by a team of robots. Object and robots in microgravity environments are not subject to friction but are instead free floating. This property is…

Grasping is the dominant approach for robot manipulation, but only a single object can be grasped at a time. Nonprehensile manipulation offers richer set of interactions, however state-of-the-art is limited to using the end-effector only.…

For mobile robots, navigating cluttered or dynamic environments often necessitates non-prehensile manipulation, particularly when faced with objects that are too large, irregular, or fragile to grasp. The unpredictable behavior and varying…

We introduce the use of hierarchical clustering for relaxed, deterministic coordination and control of multiple robots. Traditionally an unsupervised learning method, hierarchical clustering offers a formalism for identifying and…

This paper investigates one of the most challenging tasks in dynamic manipulation -- catching large-momentum moving objects. Beyond the realm of quasi-static manipulation, dealing with highly dynamic objects can significantly improve the…

The problem of coordination without a priori information about the environment is important in robotics. Applications vary from formation control to search and rescue. This paper considers the problem of search by a group of solitary…

Producing robust task plans in human-robot collaborative missions is a critical activity in order to increase the likelihood of these missions completing successfully. Despite the broad research body in the area, which considers different…

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…

Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…