Related papers: Optimal Knock-Pick Planning for Tightly Packed Tab…

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…

Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar…

When performing manipulation-based activities such as picking objects, a mobile robot needs to position its base at a location that supports successful execution. To address this problem, prominent approaches typically rely on costly grasp…

For robot manipulation, both the controller and end-effector design are crucial. Soft grippers are generalizable by deforming to different geometries, but designing such a gripper and finding its grasp pose remains challenging. In this…

We consider manipulation problems in constrained and cluttered settings, which require several regrasps at unknown locations. We propose to inform an optimization-based task and motion planning (TAMP) solver with possible regrasp areas and…

In this paper, we present a planner that plans a sequence of base positions for a mobile manipulator to efficiently and robustly collect objects stored in distinct trays. We achieve high efficiency by exploring the common areas where a…

We develop a novel mathematical programming approximation framework to tackle the stochastic knapsack problem. In this problem, the decision maker considers items for which either weights or values, or both, are random. The aim is to select…

Customized grippers have broad applications in industrial assembly lines. Compared with general parallel grippers, the customized grippers have specifically designed fingers to increase the contact area with the workpieces and improve the…

The rise in additive manufacturing comes with unique opportunities and challenges. Massive part customization and rapid design changes are made possible with additive manufacturing, however, manufacturing industries that desire the…

Robotic pick-and-place (PnP) operations on moving conveyors find a wide range of industrial applications. In practice, simple greedy heuristics (e.g., prioritization based on the time to process a single object) are applied that achieve…

This letter presents a novel small gripper capable of grasping various types of small-sized items from flat surfaces for the assembly of small devices. Using a single actuator, the proposed gripper realizes two grasping modes: parallel-grip…

This paper presents an approach to in-hand manipulation planning that exploits the mechanics of alternating sticking contact. Particularly, we consider the problem of manipulating a grasped object using external pushes for which the pusher…

We initiate a systematic study of utilizing predictions to improve over approximation guarantees of classic algorithms, without increasing the running time. We propose a systematic method for a wide class of optimization problems that ask…

The paper addresses an optimal control problem for a perturbed sweeping process of the rate-independent hysteresis type described by a controlled "play and stop" operator with separately controlled perturbations. This problem can be reduced…

Industrial bin picking for tangled-prone objects requires the robot to either pick up untangled objects or perform separation manipulation when the bin contains no isolated objects. The robot must be able to flexibly perform appropriate…

Efficient and safe retrieval of stacked objects in warehouse environments is a significant challenge due to complex spatial dependencies and structural inter-dependencies. Traditional vision-based methods excel at object localization but…

We study the problem of discrete geometric packing. Here, given weighted regions (say in the plane) and points (with capacities), one has to pick a maximum weight subset of the regions such that no point is covered more than its capacity.…

How can a stack of identical blocks be arranged to extend beyond the edge of a table as far as possible? We consider a generalization of this classic puzzle to blocks that differ in width and mass. Despite the seemingly simple premise, we…

The paper proposes an integrated approach to the design optimization of parallel manipulators, which is based on the concept of the workspace grid and utilizes the goal-attainment formulation for the global optimization. To combine the…

Grasping has been a long-standing challenge in facilitating the final interface between a robot and the environment. As environments and tasks become complicated, the need to embed higher intelligence to infer from the surroundings and act…