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Karl Van Wyk

19 accepted papers

2026

DextrAH-RGB: Visuomotor Policies to Grasp Anything with Dexterous Hands

ICRA 2026poster

One of the most important, yet challenging, skills for a dexterous robot is grasping a diverse range of objects. Much of the prior work has been limited by speed, generality, or reliance on depth maps and object poses. In this paper, we introduce DextrAH-RGB, a system that can perform dexterous arm-…

2025

Synthetica: Large Scale Synthetic Data Generation for Robot Perception

IROS 2025

Vision-based object detectors are a crucial basis for robotics applications as they provide valuable information about object localization in the environment. These need to ensure high reliability in different lighting conditions, occlusions, and visual artifacts, all while running in real-time. Col

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2024

AutoMate: Specialist and Generalist Assembly Policies over Diverse Geometries

RSS 2024poster

Robotic assembly for high-mixture settings requires adaptivity to diverse parts and poses, which is an open challenge. Meanwhile, in other areas of robotics, large models and sim-to-real have led to tremendous progress. Inspired by such work, we present AutoMate, a learning framework and system that…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

DextrAH-G: Pixels-to-Action Dexterous Arm-Hand Grasping with Geometric Fabrics

CoRL 2024poster

A pivotal challenge in robotics is achieving fast, safe, and robust dexterous grasping across a diverse range of objects, an important goal within industrial applications. However, existing methods often have very limited speed, dexterity, and generality, along with limited or no hardware safety gua…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2024

Geometric Fabrics: a Safe Guiding Medium for Policy Learning

ICRA 2024poster

Robotics policies are always subjected to complex, second order dynamics that entangle their actions with resulting states. In reinforcement learning (RL) contexts, policies have the burden of deciphering these complicated interactions over massive amounts of experience and complex reward functions…

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2023

AnyTeleop: A General Vision-Based Dexterous Robot Arm-Hand Teleoperation System

RSS 2023poster

Vision-based teleoperation offers the possibility to endow robots with human-level intelligence to physically interact with the environment, while only requiring low-cost camera sensors. However, current vision-based teleoperation systems are designed and engineered towards a particular robot model…

Cited by 114SourcePDFScholar
2023

CuRobo: Parallelized Collision-Free Robot Motion Generation

ICRA 2023poster

This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness on massively parallel GPUs. We show that combining simp…

Cited by 74SourceScholar
2023

DeXtreme: Transfer of Agile In-hand Manipulation from Simulation to Reality

ICRA 2023poster

Recent work has demonstrated the ability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to learn complex robotic behaviours in simulation, including in the domain of multi-fingered manipulation. However, such models can be challenging to transfer to the real world due to the gap between simulation a…

Cited by 146SourceScholar
2023

Global and Reactive Motion Generation with Geometric Fabric Command Sequences

ICRA 2023poster

Motion generation seeks to produce safe and feasible robot motion from start to goal. Various tools at different levels of granularity have been developed. On one extreme, sampling-based motion planners focus on completeness - a solution, if it exists, would eventually be found. However, produced pa…

Cited by 19SourceScholar
2022

Geometric Fabrics: Generalizing Classical Mechanics to Capture the Physics of Behavior

RA-L 2022

Classical mechanical systems are central to controller design in energy shaping methods of geometric control. However, their expressivity is limited by position-only metrics and the intimate link between metric and geometry. Recent work on Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs) has shown that shedding th

Cited by 49SourceScholar
2022

Learning Robust Real-World Dexterous Grasping Policies via Implicit Shape Augmentation

CoRL 2022poster

Dexterous robotic hands have the capability to interact with a wide variety of household objects. However, learning robust real world grasping policies for arbitrary objects has proven challenging due to the difficulty of generating high quality training data. In this work, we propose a learning sys…

Cited by 32SourceScholar
2022

Neural Geometric Fabrics: Efficiently Learning High-Dimensional Policies from Demonstration

CoRL 2022poster

Learning dexterous manipulation policies for multi-fingered robots has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Existing methods either limit themselves to highly constrained problems and smaller models to achieve extreme sample efficiency or sacrifice sample efficiency to gain capacity to solve…

Cited by 18SourceScholar
2021

DexYCB: A Benchmark for Capturing Hand Grasping of Objects

CVPR 2021poster

We introduce DexYCB, a new dataset for capturing hand grasping of objects. We first compare DexYCB with a related one through cross-dataset evaluation. We then present a thorough benchmark of state-of-the-art approaches on three relevant tasks: 2D object and keypoint detection, 6D object pose estima…

Cited by 314PDFcodeScholar
2021

Generalized Nonlinear and Finsler Geometry for Robotics

ICRA 2021poster

Robotics research has found numerous important applications of Riemannian geometry. Despite that, the concept remain challenging to many roboticists because the background material is complex and strikingly foreign. Beyond Riemannian geometry, there are many natural generalizations in the mathematic…

Cited by 31SourceScholar
2020

Benchmarking Protocols for Evaluating Small Parts Robotic Assembly Systems

RA-L 2020

This paper presents a set of performance metrics, test methods, and associated artifacts to help progress the development and deployment of robotic assembly systems. The designs for three task board artifacts that replicate small part insertion and fastening operations such as threading, snap fittin

Cited by 95SourceScholar
2020

DexPilot: Vision-Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System

ICRA 2020

Teleoperation offers the possibility of imparting robotic systems with sophisticated reasoning skills, intuition, and creativity to perform tasks. However, teleoperation solutions for high degree-of-actuation (DoA), multi-fingered robots are generally cost-prohibitive, while low-cost offerings usual

Cited by 279SourceScholar
2020

In-Hand Object Pose Tracking via Contact Feedback and GPU-Accelerated Robotic Simulation

ICRA 2020poster

Tracking the pose of an object while it is being held and manipulated by a robot hand is difficult for vision-based methods due to significant occlusions. Prior works have explored using contact feedback and particle filters to localize in-hand objects. However, they have mostly focused on the stati…

Cited by 38SourceScholar
2020

Interpreting and Predicting Tactile Signals via a Physics-Based and Data-Driven Framework

RSS 2020poster

High-density afferents in the human hand have long been regarded as essential for human grasping and manipulation abilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors are typically used to provide low-density contact data, such as center-of-pressure and resultant force. Although useful, this data does no…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar