Related papers: MicroPush: A Simulator and Benchmark for Contact-R…
Contact-rich micromanipulation in microfluidic flow is challenging because small disturbances can break pushing contact and induce large lateral drift. We study planar cell pushing with a magnetic rolling microrobot that tracks a…
This paper presents MicroRoboScope, a portable, compact, and versatile microrobotic experimentation platform designed for real-time, closed-loop control of both magnetic and acoustic microrobots. The system integrates an embedded computer,…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
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,…
In this paper, we discuss a framework for teaching bimanual manipulation tasks by imitation. To this end, we present a system and algorithms for learning compliant and contact-rich robot behavior from human demonstrations. The presented…
Magnetic navigation systems, including magnetic tracking systems and magnetic actuation systems, have shown great potential for occlusion-free localization and remote control of intracorporeal medical devices and robots in minimally…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
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…
Pushing is a fundamental robotic skill. Existing work has shown how to exploit models of pushing to achieve a variety of tasks, including grasping under uncertainty, in-hand manipulation and clearing clutter. Such models, however, are…
Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
The need for contact-rich tasks is rapidly growing in modern manufacturing settings. However, few traditional robotic assembly skills consider environmental constraints during task execution, and most of them use these constraints as…
We propose a novel fast and accurate simulation framework for contact-intensive tight-tolerance robotic assembly tasks. The key components of our framework are as follows: 1) data-driven contact point clustering with a certain…
Robotic manipulation tasks are contact-rich, yet most imitation learning (IL) approaches rely primarily on vision, which struggles to capture stiffness, roughness, slip, and other fine interaction cues. Tactile signals can address this gap,…
Pushing is a simple yet effective skill for robots to interact with and further change the environment. Related work has been mostly focused on utilizing it as a non-prehensile manipulation primitive for a robotic manipulator. However, it…
Modular microrobotics can potentially address many information-intensive microtasks in medicine, manufacturing and the environment. However, surface area has limited the natural powering, communication, functional integration, and…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…