Related papers: Push, Press, Slide: Mode-Aware Planar Contact Mani…
Robot manipulation in a physically-constrained environment requires compliant manipulation. Compliant manipulation is a manipulation skill to adjust hand motion based on the force imposed by the environment. Recently, reinforcement learning…
Wearable robotic hand rehabilitation devices can allow greater freedom and flexibility than their workstation-like counterparts. However, the field is generally lacking effective methods by which the user can operate the device: such…
Manipulation in cluttered environments is challenging due to spatial dependencies among objects, where an improper manipulation order can cause collisions or blocked access. Existing approaches often overlook these spatial relationships,…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
This work explores the use of topological tools for achieving effective non-prehensile manipulation in cluttered, constrained workspaces. In particular, it proposes the use of persistent homology as a guiding principle in identifying the…
Contact adaption is an essential capability when manipulating objects. Two key contact modes of non-prehensile manipulation are sticking and sliding. This paper presents a Trajectory Optimization (TO) method formulated as a Mathematical…
Humans subconsciously choose robust ways of selecting and using tools, for example, choosing a ladle over a flat spatula to serve meatballs. However, robustness under external disturbances remains underexplored in robotic tool-use planning.…
Recent studies on quadruped robots have focused on either locomotion or mobile manipulation using a robotic arm. Legged robots can manipulate heavier and larger objects using non-prehensile manipulation primitives, such as planar pushing,…
In this paper, we address the challenge of performing non-prehensile pushing operations with a compliant robotic manipulation system. To ensure safe operations in human-populated environments, robots must comply with external physical…
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…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades but is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance guarantees -…
While non-prehensile manipulation (e.g., controlled pushing/poking) constitutes a foundational robotic skill, its learning remains challenging due to the high sensitivity to complex physical interactions involving friction and restitution.…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
We propose a polynomial force-motion model for planar sliding. The set of generalized friction loads is the 1-sublevel set of a polynomial whose gradient directions correspond to generalized velocities. Additionally, the polynomial is…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
Robotic manipulation is essential for modernizing factories and automating industrial tasks like polishing, which require advanced tactile abilities. These robots must be easily set up, safely work with humans, learn tasks autonomously, and…
With the continuous advancement of robot teleoperation technology, shared control is used to reduce the physical and mental load of the operator in teleoperation system. This paper proposes an alternating shared control framework for object…
This paper presents a novel type of mobile rolling robot designed as a modular platform for non-prehensile manipulation, highlighting the associated control challenges in achieving balancing control of the robotic system. The developed…
Pushing is an essential non-prehensile manipulation skill used for tasks ranging from pre-grasp manipulation to scene rearrangement, reasoning about object relations in the scene, and thus pushing actions have been widely studied in…