Related papers: Pack it in: Packing into Partially Filled Containe…

The multidisciplinarity of robotics creates a need for robust integration methodologies that can facilitate the adoption of state-of-the-art research components in an industrial application. Unfortunately, there are no clear, community…

If we consider human manipulation, it is clear that contact-rich manipulation (CRM)-the ability to use any surface of the manipulator to make contact with objects-can be far more efficient and natural than relying solely on end-effectors…

The choice of a grasp plays a critical role in the success of downstream manipulation tasks. Consider a task of placing an object in a cluttered scene; the majority of possible grasps may not be suitable for the desired placement. In this…

The study on the relationship between the spheres and voids in packing system suggests that the edge effect at the interface between the container and the particles is an important factor lowering the packing ratio. To pack spheres in a…

We present an AND/OR graph-based, integrated multi-robot task and motion planning approach which (i) performs task allocation coordinating the activity of a given number of robots, and (ii) is capable of handling tasks which involve an a…

Autonomous delivery of goods using a MAV is a difficult problem, as it poses high demand on the MAV's control, perception and manipulation capabilities. This problem is especially challenging if the exact shape, location and configuration…

Robot-assisted feeding can greatly enhance the lives of those with mobility limitations. Modern feeding systems can pick up and position food in front of a care recipient's mouth for a bite. However, many with severe mobility constraints…

The growing adoption of batteries in the electric vehicle industry and various consumer products has created an urgent need for effective recycling solutions. These products often contain a mix of compliant and rigid components, making…

Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception…

The ability to jointly understand the geometry of objects and plan actions for manipulating them is crucial for intelligent agents. We refer to this ability as geometric planning. Recently, many interactive environments have been proposed…

Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…

We address the manipulation task of retrieving a target object from a cluttered shelf. When the target object is hidden, the robot must search through the clutter for retrieving it. Solving this task requires reasoning over the likely…

Many methods have been developed for planning the motion of robotic arms for picking and placing, ranging from local optimization to global search techniques, which are effective for sparsely placed objects. Dense clutter, however, still…

In this work, we present a novel algorithm to perform spill-free handling of open-top liquid-filled containers that operates in cluttered environments. By allowing liquid-filled containers to be tilted at higher angles and enabling motion…

Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in the last decades. One of the central challenges of manipulation is partial observability, as the agent usually does…

In a robotised warehouse a major issue is the safety of human operators in case of intervention in the work area of the robots. The current solution is to shut down every robot but it causes a loss of productivity, especially for large…

Manipulation planning is the task of computing robot trajectories that move a set of objects to their target configuration while satisfying physically feasibility. In contrast to existing works that assume known object templates, we are…

Robotic navigation in dense, cluttered environments such as agricultural canopies presents significant challenges due to physical and visual occlusion caused by leaves and branches. Traditional vision-based or model-dependent approaches…

Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…

Picking an item in the presence of other objects can be challenging as it involves occlusions and partial views. Given object models, one approach is to perform object pose estimation and use the most likely candidate pose per object to…