23 accepted papers
Choosing appropriate fabrics is critical for meeting functional and quality demands in robotic textile manufacturing, apparel production, and smart retail. We propose MLLM-Fabric, a robotic framework leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for fabric sorting and selection. Built on a mul…
Classical video quality assessment (VQA) methods generate a numerical score to judge a video's perceived visual fidelity and clarity. Yet, a score fails to describe the video's complex quality dimensions (e.g., noise), restricting its applicability. Benefiting from the human-friendly linguistic outp
Dexterous in-hand manipulation remains a foundational challenge in robotics, with progress often constrained by the prevailing paradigm of imitating the human hand. This anthropomorphic approach creates two critical barriers: 1) it limits robotic capabilities to tasks humans can already perform, and…
Robot-assisted dressing is a popular but challenging topic in the field of robotic manipulation, offering significant potential to improve the quality of life for individuals with mobility limitations. Currently, the majority of research on robot-assisted dressing focuses on how to put on loose-fitt
Choosing appropriate fabrics is critical for meeting functional and quality demands in robotic textile manufacturing, apparel production, and smart retail. We propose MLLM-Fabric, a robotic framework leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for fabric sorting and selection. Built on a mul
3D perception of deformable linear objects (DLOs) is crucial for DLO manipulation. However, perceiving DLOs in 3D from a single RGBD image is challenging. Previous DLO perception methods fail to extract a decent 3D DLO model due to different textures, occlusions, sparse and false depth information.
In field environments, numerous robots necessitate manual intervention for restoration of functionality post a turnover, resulting in diminished operational efficiency. This study presents an innovative design solution for a reversible omnidirectional mobile robot denoted as CuRobot, featuring a cub
Deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation is needed in many fields. Previous research on deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation has primarily involved parallel jaw gripper manipulation with fixed grasping positions. However, the potential for dexterous manipulation of DLOs using an anthropomo…
Fabrics present significant challenges to robotic manipulation due to their complex dynamics and infinite degrees of freedom. This letter proposes a non-prehensile approach to aligning a fabric cut piece to a specified target pose, which is a common step for many garment manufacturing tasks. Compare
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely utilized to perform complex robotic tasks. However, handling external disturbances during tasks is still an open challenge. This paper proposes a novel method to achieve robotic adaptive tasks based on LLMs and Behavior Trees (BTs). It utilizes ChatGPT t…
Data in the real world tends to exhibit a long-tailed label distribution, which poses great challenges for the training of neural networks in visual recognition. Existing methods tackle this problem mainly from the perspective of data quantity, i.e., the number of samples in each class. To be specif…
The papers in this special section focus on robotic handling of deformable objects. Object handling and manipulation is a recurrent theme in robotics, moving progressively from simple rigid objects to articulated objects and then complex deformable objects. In recent years, there has been a growing
Moving away from repetitive tasks, robots nowadays demand versatile skills that adapt to different situations. Task-parameterized learning improves the generalization of motion policies by encoding relevant contextual information in the task parameters, hence enabling flexible task executions. Howev
Knowledge representation learning (KRL) has been used in plenty of knowledge-driven tasks. Despite fruitfully progress, existing methods still suffer from the immaturity on tackling potentially-imperfect knowledge graphs and highly-imbalanced positive-negative instances during training, both of whic…
Soft object manipulation has recently gained popularity within the robotics community due to its potential applications in many economically important areas. Although great progress has been recently achieved in these types of tasks, most state-of-the-art methods are case-specific; They can only be
Humans use contacts in the environment to modify the shape of deformable objects. Yet, few papers have studied the use of contacts in robotic manipulation. In this letter, we investigate the problem of robotic manipulation of cables with environmental contacts. Instead of avoiding contacts, we propo
Aerial imagery plays an important role in land-use planning, population analysis, precision agriculture, and unmanned aerial vehicle tasks. However, existing aerial image datasets generally suffer from the problem of inaccurate labeling, single ground truth type, and few category numbers. In this wo…
This paper presents the development and hovering control of a tailsitter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that merges long endurance and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) abilities. The designed tailsitter contains one flying-wing with two motors and two elevons. Vehicle aerodynamics and a six-degree…
Tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained extensive popularity in recent years due to their inherent advantages of both fixed wing and rotary wing UAVs. However, these advantages are accompanied with control challenges because of two different flight regimes and drastically changing dy…
Deforming a cable to a desired (reachable) shape is a trivial task for a human to do without even knowing the internal dynamics of the cable. This paper proposes a framework for cable shapes manipulation with multiple robot manipulators. The shape is parameterized by a Fourier series. A local deform…
This paper focuses on the design, modelling and hovering control of a tail-sitter with single thrust-vectored propeller which possesses the inherent advantages of both fixed wing and rotary wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The developed tail-sitter requires only the same number of actuators as…
This paper discusses the design and control methods of a thrust-vectored tailsitter that combines the advantages of both fixed wing and rotary wing systems. Separable takeoff bracket and controllable forward landing are implemented to reduce the flight weight and mitigate the effects of crosswinds.…
The prop-hanging control of the fixed-wing aircraft can enable the vehicle to improve the cruise performance and hover ability. The prop-hanging control of the thrust vector vehicle would be a challenging problem, for the reason that it is a system with properties of inherent instability, coupling,