Related papers: PushingBots: Collaborative Pushing via Neural Acce…

Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance,…

We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…

We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…

Multi-robot assembly systems are becoming increasingly appealing in manufacturing due to their ability to automatically, flexibly, and quickly construct desired structural designs. However, effectively planning for these systems in a manner…

Multi-robot control in cluttered environments is a challenging problem that involves complex physical constraints, including robot-robot collisions, robot-obstacle collisions, and unreachable motions. Successful planning in such settings…

Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping…

Pushing is an essential non-prehensile manipulation skill used for tasks ranging from pre-grasp manipulation to scene rearrangement, reasoning about object relations in the scene, and thus pushing actions have been widely studied in…

Understanding human intentions is critical for safe and effective human-robot collaboration. While state of the art methods for human goal prediction utilize learned models to account for the uncertainty of human motion data, that data is…

We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, in which a robot and a user collaboratively move an object to a goal pose. In the absence of explicit communication, this problem is challenging because it demands tight implicit coordination…

Simultaneously grasping and delivering multiple objects can significantly enhance robotic work efficiency and has been a key research focus for decades. The primary challenge lies in determining how to push objects, group them, and execute…

Real-world object manipulation has been commonly challenged by physical uncertainties and perception limitations. Being an effective strategy, while caging configuration-based manipulation frameworks have successfully provided robust…

For robots to operate in general environments like households, they must be able to perform non-prehensile manipulation actions such as toppling and rolling to manipulate ungraspable objects. However, prior works on non-prehensile…

A flexible operation of multiple robotic manipulators in a shared workspace requires an online trajectory planning with static and dynamic collision avoidance. In this work, we propose a real-time capable motion control algorithm, based on…

Socially aware robot navigation is a planning paradigm where the robot navigates in human environments and tries to adhere to social constraints while interacting with the humans in the scene. These navigation strategies were further…

Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…

Robotic grasping in cluttered environments is often infeasible due to obstacles preventing possible grasps. Then, pre-grasping manipulation like shifting or pushing an object becomes necessary. We developed an algorithm that can learn, in…

Object transportation in cluttered environments is a fundamental task in various domains, including domestic service and warehouse logistics. In cooperative object transport, multiple robots must coordinate to move objects that are too…

Practical deployments of coordinated fleets of mobile robots in different environments have revealed the benefits of maintaining small distances between robots, especially as they move at higher speeds. However, this is counter-intuitive in…

Task allocation plays a vital role in multi-robot autonomous cleaning systems, where multiple robots work together to clean a large area. However, most current studies mainly focus on deterministic, single-task allocation for cleaning…

This paper proposes a technique to manipulate an object with a nonholonomic mobile robot by pushing, which is a nonprehensile manipulation motion primitive. Such a primitive involves unilateral constraints associated with the friction…