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Social robots often rely on visual perception to understand their users and the environment. Recent advancements in data-driven approaches for computer vision have demonstrated great potentials for applying deep-learning models to enhance a…
Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores…
Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we…
Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…
We present a framework that allows an observer to determine occluded portions of a structure by finding the maximum-likelihood estimate of those occluded portions consistent with visible image evidence and a consistency model. Doing this…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…
Entanglements like vines and branches in natural settings or cords and pipes in human spaces prevent mobile robots from accessing many environments. Legged robots should be effective in these settings, and more so than wheeled or tracked…
We consider the problem of navigating a mobile robot towards a target in an unknown environment that is endowed with visual sensors, where neither the robot nor the sensors have access to global positioning information and only use…
Legged robots are physically capable of navigating a diverse variety of environments and overcoming a wide range of obstructions. For example, in a search and rescue mission, a legged robot could climb over debris, crawl through gaps, and…
Learning object manipulation is a critical skill for robots to interact with their environment. Even though there has been significant progress in robotic manipulation of rigid objects, interacting with non-rigid objects remains challenging…
In order to manipulate a deformable object, such as rope or cloth, in unstructured environments, robots need a way to estimate its current shape. However, tracking the shape of a deformable object can be challenging because of the object's…
Robotic science missions in remote environments, such as deep ocean and outer space, can involve studying phenomena that cannot directly be observed using on-board sensors but must be deduced by combining measurements of correlated…
Transparent object perception is a rapidly developing research problem in artificial intelligence. The ability to perceive transparent objects enables robots to achieve higher levels of autonomy, unlocking new applications in various…
We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…
Environment perception is the task for intelligent vehicles on which all subsequent steps rely. A key part of perception is to safely detect other road users such as vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. With modern deep learning techniques…
Scene understanding and object recognition is a difficult to achieve yet crucial skill for robots. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), have shown success in this task. However, there is still a gap between their performance on…
Systems involving human-robot collaboration necessarily require that steps be taken to ensure safety of the participating human. This is usually achievable if accurate, reliable estimates of the human's pose are available. In this paper, we…
In everyday life collaboration tasks between human operators and robots, the former necessitate simple ways for programming new skills, the latter have to show adaptive capabilities to cope with environmental changes. The joint use of…
With the increasing demand for mobile robots and autonomous vehicles, several approaches for long-term robot navigation have been proposed. Among these techniques, ground segmentation and traversability estimation play important roles in…
Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and…