16 accepted papers
Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By enabling compliant robot motions, collisions between the rob
Achieving controlled sliding of objects on finger surfaces is a significant challenge for robots, substantially constraining their ability to perform complex in-hand manipulation tasks. In this work, we investigate the role of surface vibration in modulating the effective friction at the object-fing
Contact can be conceptualized as a set of constraints imposed on two bodies that are interacting with one another in some way. The nature of a contact, whether a point, line, or surface, dictates how these bodies are able to move with respect to one another given a force, and a set of contacts can p…
Constraining contacts to remain fixed on an object during manipulation limits the potential workspace size, as motion is subject to the hand’s kinematic topology. Finger gaiting is one way to alleviate such restraints. It allows contacts to be freely broken and remade so as to operate on different m
This letter presents an algorithm to simultaneously reconstruct the geometry of an unknown object and its environment via physical interactions. Applications involving highly cluttered or occluded workspaces prevent the effective use of vision. To address some of the challenges that arise, we propos
Substantial advancements to model-based reinforcement learning algorithms have been impeded by the model-bias induced by the collected data, which generally hurts performance. Meanwhile, their inherent sample efficiency warrants utility for most robot applications, limiting potential damage to the r…
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 systems. This paper demonstrates that the combination of state-of-…
In this work, we propose a pick-and-place benchmark to assess the manipulation capabilities of a robotic system. The benchmark is based on the Box and Blocks Test (BBT), a task utilized for decades by the rehabilitation community to assess unilateral gross manual dexterity in humans. We propose thre
Grasping can be conceptualized as the ability of an end-effector to temporarily attach or fixture an object to a manipulator-constraining all motion of the workpiece with respect to the end-effector's base frame. This seemingly simplistic action often requires excessive sensing, computation, or cont…
We address the problem of controlling a partially constrained trajectory of the manipulation frame-an arbitrary frame of reference rigidly attached to the object-as the desired motion about this frame is often underdefined. This may be apparent, for example, when the task requires control only about
We address the problem of developing precision, quasi-static control strategies for fingertip manipulation in robot hands. In general, analytically specifying useful object transition maps, or hand-object Jacobians, for scenarios in which there is uncertainty in some key aspect of the hand-object sy…
In this work, we present a within-hand manipulation approach that leverages a simple energy model based on caging grasps made by underactuated hands. Instead of explicitly modeling the contacts and dynamics in manipulation, we can calculate a map to describe the energy states of different hand-objec…
Fully actuated multifingered robotic hands are often expensive and fragile. Low-cost underactuated hands are appealing but present challenges due to the lack of analytical models. This letter aims to learn a stochastic version of such models automatically from data with minimum user effort. The focu
In this work, we investigate a mechanics-inspired framework for describing fingertip-based planar within-hand manipulation with an underactuated robotic gripper. In particular, this framework leverages fundamental mechanics properties of the hand-object system, including basic terms such as local co…
We address the problem of pregrasp sliding manipulation, which is an essential skill when a thin object cannot be directly grasped from a flat surface. Leveraged on the passive reconfigurability of soft, compliant, or underactuated robotic hands, we formulate this problem as an integrated motion and
Current robotic terrain mapping techniques require expensive sensor suites to construct an environmental representation. In this work, we present a cube-shaped robot that can roll through unstructured terrain and construct a detailed topographic map of the surface that it traverses in real time with…