23 accepted papers
Robotic telemanipulation—the human-guided manipulation of remote objects—plays a pivotal role in several applications, from healthcare to operations in harsh environments. While visual feedback from cameras can provide valuable information to the human operator, haptic feedback is essential for acce…
Robotic telemanipulation is central in many applications, from healthcare to harsh environments. While visual feedback from cameras can provide valuable information to the human operator, haptic feedback offers insight into certain object properties - such as stiffness - that vision alone cannot pro
While visual sensing is often the predominant modality for a robot to localize objects in the environment, tactile and force sensing become crucial when objects are occluded, poorly visible, or buried. However, existing works on locating buried objects rely solely on force measurements at a single c…
Effective execution of long-horizon tasks with dexterous robotic hands remains a significant challenge in real-world problems. While learning from human demonstrations has shown encouraging results, they require extensive data collection for training. Hence, decomposing long-horizon tasks into reusa…
Recognizing objects by touch is a very useful skill for robots to be employed in both structured and unstructured environments. While in some applications it is useful to recognize an object from a single touch, in other scenarios specific robot movements can be used to obtain more information about
The shapes of most real-world objects are symmetric with respect to at least one plane of symmetry. This information is unconsciously used by humans when they attempt to estimate the shape of an object in presence of uncertainty or missing evidence, for example if the object is partially occluded or…
The ability to detect that a grasped object is slipping from the robot gripper is a crucial skill for autonomous robotic manipulation. However, current solutions for automatic slip detection do not perform well in real-world unstructured settings, in which a wide variety of gripper-object interactio…
The growing consumer demand for large volumes of high quality fruit has generated an increasing need for auto-mated fruit quality control during production. Optical methods have been proved successful in a few cases, but with limitations related to the variability of fruit colors and lighting condit…
Texture sensing is one of the types of information sensed by humans through touch, and is thus of interest to robotics that this type of information can be acquired and processed. In this work we present a texture topography sensor based on a ciliary structure, a biological structure found in many o…
Dexterous robotic manipulation of unknown objects can open the way to novel tasks and applications of robots in semi-structured and unstructured settings, from advanced industrial manufacturing to exploration of harsh environments. However, it is challenging for at least three reasons: the desired m…
Tactile sensing is one important element that can enable robots to interact with an unstructured world. By having tactile perception, a robot can explore its environment by touching objects. Like human skin, a tactile sensor that can provide rich information such as distributed normal and shear forc
Typically, the range and sensitivity of force sensors are determined during production. However, to be able to do both delicate and high-force demanding work, adjustable force sensitivity would be beneficial. The current paper proposes such a sensor by implementing a planar electromagnet above a 3-a…
Close human-robot cooperation is a key enabler for new developments in advanced manufacturing and assistive applications. Close cooperation require robots that can predict human actions and intent, understanding human non-verbal cues. Recent approaches based on neural networks have led to encouragin…
Distributed tactile sensing is crucial to perform stable, subtle, and precise manipulation so that a robot can recognize and handle objects properly. However, currently existing skin sensors still have common problems such as complex and expensive production or are difficult to integrate into robot
Robust grasping is a major, and still unsolved, problem in robotics. Information about the 3D shape of an object can be obtained either from prior knowledge (e.g., accurate models of known objects or approximate models of familiar objects) or real-time sensing (e.g., partial point clouds of unknown…
The detection of small forces is of great interest in any robotic application that involves interaction with the environment (e.g., objects manipulation, physical human-robot interaction, minimally invasive surgery), since it allows the robot to detect the contacts early on and to act accordingly. I
In this paper we present a low-cost and easy to fabricate 3-axis tactile sensor based on magnetic technology. The sensor consists in a small magnet immersed in a silicone body with an Hall-effect sensor placed below to detect changes in the magnetic field caused by displacements of the magnet, gener…
Vision-based grasping for humanoid robots is a challenging problem due to a multitude of factors. First, humanoid robots use an “eye-to-hand” kinematics configuration that, on the contrary to the more common “eye-in-hand” configuration, demands a precise estimate of the position of the robot's hand.…
The letter reports an evaluation of the iCub grasping capabilities, performed using the YCB Object and Model Set. The goal is to understand what kind of objects the iCub dexterous hand can grasp, and with what degree of robustness and flexibility, given the best possible control strategy. Therefore,
The concept of affordances facilitates the encoding of relations between actions and effects in an environment centered around the agent. Such an interpretation has important impacts on several cognitive capabilities and manifestations of intelligence, such as prediction and planning. In this paper,
This paper addresses the problem of having a robot executing motor tasks requested by a human through spoken language. Verbal instructions do not typically have a one-to-one mapping to robot actions, due to various reasons: economy of spoken language, e.g., one short instruction might indeed corresp
Safe and robust grasping of unknown objects is a major challenge in robotics, which has no general solution yet. A promising approach relies on haptic exploration, where active optimization strategies can be employed to reduce the number of exploration trials. One critical problem is that certain op…
This paper proposes a novel approach to generate trajectories that generalize given demonstrations according to optimality criteria. By formulating the problem as a quadratic program we can efficiently incorporate constraints to adapt to new desired motion requirements while achieving the main goal…