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Robot learning of real-world manipulation tasks remains challenging and time consuming, even though actions are often simplified by single-step manipulation primitives. In order to compensate the removed time dependency, we additionally…
We consider the problem of sorting a densely cluttered pile of unknown objects using a robot. This yet unsolved problem is relevant in the robotic waste sorting business. By extending previous active learning approaches to grasping, we show…
One of the great promises of robot learning systems is that they will be able to learn from their mistakes and continuously adapt to ever-changing environments. Despite this potential, most of the robot learning systems today are deployed…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate…
We present a research picking prototype related to our company's industrial waste sorting application. The goal of the prototype is to be as autonomous as possible and it both calibrates itself and improves its picking with minimal human…
Autonomous feeding is challenging because it requires manipulation of food items with various compliance, sizes, and shapes. To understand how humans manipulate food items during feeding and to explore ways to adapt their strategies to…
A promising approach to solving challenging long-horizon tasks has been to extract behavior priors (skills) by fitting generative models to large offline datasets of demonstrations. However, such generative models inherit the biases of the…
In most contact-rich manipulation tasks, humans apply time-varying forces to the target object, compensating for inaccuracies in the vision-guided hand trajectory. However, current robot learning algorithms primarily focus on…
Flexible pick-and-place is a fundamental yet challenging task within robotics, in particular due to the need of an object model for a simple target pose definition. In this work, the robot instead learns to pick-and-place objects using…
Cutting is a common form of manipulation when working with divisible objects such as food, rope, or clay. Cooking in particular relies heavily on cutting to divide food items into desired shapes. However, cutting food is a challenging task…
Imitation learning from human demonstrations enables robots to perform complex manipulation tasks and has recently witnessed huge success. However, these techniques often struggle to adapt behavior to new preferences or changes in the…
Workers spend a significant amount of time learning how to make good decisions. Evaluating the efficacy of a given decision, however, can be complicated -- e.g., decision outcomes are often long-term and relate to the original decision in…
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…
Given the task of learning robotic grasping solely based on a depth camera input and gripper force feedback, we derive a learning algorithm from an applied point of view to significantly reduce the amount of required training data. Major…
Humans naturally "program" a fellow collaborator to perform a task by demonstrating the task few times. It is intuitive, therefore, for a human to program a collaborative robot by demonstration and many paradigms use a single demonstration…
We study an emerging problem named "grasping the invisible" in robotic manipulation, in which a robot is tasked to grasp an initially invisible target object via a sequence of pushing and grasping actions. In this problem, pushes are needed…
Humans excel in grasping objects through diverse and robust policies, many of which are so probabilistically rare that exploration-based learning methods hardly observe and learn. Inspired by the human learning process, we propose a method…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
The ability to adapt to uncertainties, recover from failures, and coordinate between hand and fingers are essential sensorimotor skills for fully autonomous robotic grasping. In this paper, we aim to study a unified feedback control policy…
Autonomous fabric manipulation is a longstanding challenge in robotics, but evaluating progress is difficult due to the cost and diversity of robot hardware. Using Reach, a cloud robotics platform that enables low-latency remote execution…