11 accepted papers
The physicality of exercise makes the role of athletic trainers unique. Their physical presence allows them to guide a student through a motion, demonstrate an exercise, and give intuitive feedback. Robot quadrupeds are also embodied agents with robust agility and athleticism. In our work, we invest…
Collaborative robots must quickly adapt to their partner's intent and preferences to proactively identify helpful actions. This is especially true in situated settings where human partners can continually teach robots new high-level behaviors, visual concepts, and physical skills (e.g., through demo
We introduce Vocal Sandbox, a framework for enabling seamless human-robot collaboration in situated environments. Systems in our framework are characterized by their ability to *adapt and continually learn* at multiple levels of abstraction from diverse teaching modalities such as spoken dialogue, o…
Assistance during eating is essential for those with severe mobility issues or eating risks. However, dependence on traditional human caregivers is linked to malnutrition, weight loss, and low self-esteem. For those who require eating assistance, a semi-autonomous robotic platform can provide indepe…
Key to rich, dexterous manipulation in the real world is the ability to coordinate control across two hands. However, while the promise afforded by bimanual robotic systems is immense, constructing control policies for dual arm autonomous systems brings inherent difficulties. One such difficulty is…
A robotic feeding system must be able to acquire a variety of foods. Prior bite acquisition works consider single-arm spoon scooping or fork skewering, which do not generalize to foods with complex geometries and deformabilities. For example, when acquiring a group of peas, skewering could smoosh th…
Disentangling two or more cables often requires many steps to remove crossings between and within cables. We formalize the problem of disentangling multiple cables and present an algorithm, Iterative Reduction Of Non-planar Multiple cAble kNots (IRON-MAN), that outputs robot actions to remove crossi…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific fabric manipulation tasks, but comparatively less focus on algorithms which can per…
Robotic manipulation of deformable 1D objects such as ropes, cables, and hoses is challenging due to the lack of high-fidelity analytic models and large configuration spaces. Furthermore, learning end-to-end manipulation policies directly from images and physical interaction requires significant tim…
Untangling ropes, wires, and cables is a challenging task for robots due to the high-dimensional configuration space, visual homogeneity, self-occlusions, and complex dynamics. We consider dense (tight) knots that lack space between self-intersections and present an iterative approach that uses lear