Related papers: $\chi_{0}$: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via…
Humans seamlessly fuse anticipatory planning with immediate feedback to perform successive mobile manipulation tasks without stopping, achieving both high efficiency and reliability. Replicating this fluid and reliable behavior in robots…
Long-term Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is crucial for enabling flexible manufacturing systems and integrating companion robots into daily human environments over extended periods. This paper identifies several key challenges for such…
Most object manipulation strategies for robots are based on the assumption that the object is rigid (i.e., with fixed geometry) and the goal's details have been fully specified (e.g., the exact target pose). However, there are many tasks…
Large-scale robot learning has made progress on complex manipulation tasks, yet long horizon, contact rich problems, especially those involving deformable objects, remain challenging due to inconsistent demonstration quality. We propose a…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
Learning robust and generalizable world models is crucial for enabling efficient and scalable robotic control in real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for learning world models that accurately capture…
This paper presents a novel distributed robust optimization scheme for steering distributions of multi-agent systems under stochastic and deterministic uncertainty. Robust optimization is a subfield of optimization which aims to discover an…
Manipulation of large objects over long horizons (such as carts in a warehouse) is an essential skill for deployable robotic systems. Large objects require mobile manipulation which involves simultaneous manipulation, navigation, and…
Robotic manipulation demands precise control over both contact forces and motion trajectories. While force control is essential for achieving compliant interaction and high-frequency adaptation, it is limited to operations in close…
This paper develops a stochastic programming framework for multi-agent systems where task decomposition, assignment, and scheduling problems are simultaneously optimized. The framework can be applied to heterogeneous mobile robot teams with…
Long-horizon tasks in robotic manipulation present significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) due to the difficulty of designing dense reward functions and effectively exploring the expansive state-action space. However, despite…
Robotic manipulation faces critical challenges in understanding spatial affordances--the "where" and "how" of object interactions--essential for complex manipulation tasks like wiping a board or stacking objects. Existing methods, including…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of task allocation, cooperative path planning and motion coordination of the large-scale system with thousands of robots, aiming for practical applications in robotic warehouses and automated logistics…
The acquisition of high-quality, action-aligned demonstration data remains a fundamental bottleneck in scaling foundation models for dexterous robot manipulation. Although robot-free human demonstrations (e.g., the UMI paradigm) offer a…
Modern paradigms for robot imitation train expressive policy architectures on large amounts of human demonstration data. Yet performance on contact-rich, deformable-object, and long-horizon tasks plateau far below perfect execution, even…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interaction with uncertainty…
For a multi-robot system equipped with heterogeneous capabilities, this paper presents a mechanism to allocate robots to tasks in a resilient manner when anomalous environmental conditions such as weather events or adversarial attacks…
We present a planning and control framework for physics-based manipulation under uncertainty. The key idea is to interleave robust open-loop execution with closed-loop control. We derive robustness metrics through contraction theory. We use…
Any strategy used to distribute a robot ensemble over a set of sequential tasks is subject to inaccuracy due to robot-level uncertainties and environmental influences on the robots' behavior. We approach the problem of inaccuracy during…
Achieving long term autonomy of robots operating in dynamic environments such as farms remains a significant challenge. Arguably, the most demanding factors to achieve this are the on-board resource constraints such as energy, planning in…