11 accepted papers
Dexterous in-hand manipulation, especially involving interactions between grasped objects and external environments, remains a formidable challenge in robotics. This study tackles the complexities of in-hand manipulation under extrinsic contact through a representative three-finger handwriting task.…
Fine-grained and contact-rich manipulation remain challenging for robots, largely due to the underutilization of tactile feedback. To address this, we introduce TouchGuide, a novel cross-policy visuo-tactile fusion paradigm that fuses modalities within a low-dimensional action space. Specifically, T…
Dexterous in-hand manipulation, especially involving interactions between grasped objects and external environments, remains a formidable challenge in robotics. This study tackles the complexities of in-hand manipulation under extrinsic contact through a representative three-finger handwriting task.
Accurate estimation of the in-hand pose of an object based on its CAD model is crucial in both industrial applications and everyday tasks—ranging from positioning workpieces and assembling components to seamlessly inserting devices like USB connectors. While existing methods often rely on regression…
This paper proposes a novel approach to conduct routine calibration for the changing mechanical parameters over time of a vision-based tactile sensor, without disassembling its overall structure, i.e., in-situ mechanical calibration. Calibration for mechanical parameters, Young's modulus and Poisson…
This paper addresses the localization of contacts of an unknown grasped rigid object with its environment, i.e., extrinsic to the robot. We explore the key role that distributed tactile sensing plays in localizing contacts external to the robot, in contrast to the role that aggregated force/torque m…
In this paper, we propose the reduced model for the full dynamics of a bicycle and analyze its nonlinear behavior under a proportional control law for steering. Based on the Gibbs-Appell equations for the Whipple bicycle, we obtain a second-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE) that g…
In this paper, we present a new version of tactile sensor GelSlim 2.0 with the capability to estimate the contact force distribution in real time. The sensor is vision-based and uses an array of markers to track deformations on a gel pad due to contact. A new hardware design makes the sensor more ru…
In this paper, we propose an approach to detect incipient slip, i.e. predict slip, by using a high-resolution vision-based tactile sensor, GelSlim. The sensor dynamically captures the tactile imprints of the grasped object and their changes with a soft gel pad. The method assumes the object is mostl…
Friction plays a key role in manipulating objects. Most of what we do with our hands, and the most of what robots do with their grippers, is based on the ability to control frictional forces. This letter aims to better understand the variability and predictability of planar friction. In particular,
This paper presents a robotic pick-and-place system that is capable of grasping and recognizing both known and novel objects in cluttered environments. The key new feature of the system is that it handles a wide range of object categories without needing any task-specific training data for novel obj…