23 accepted papers
This paper explores the feasibility of employing EEG-based intention detection for real-time robot assistive control. We focus on predicting and distinguishing motor intentions of left/right arm movements by presenting: i) an offline data collection and training pipeline, used to train a classifier…
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects is critical for real-world applications such as food handling and robotic surgery. Unlike rigid and articulated objects, 3D deformable objects have infinite degrees of freedom. Fully defining their state requires 3D deformation and stress fields, which are e…
Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects (e.g., fruits/vegetables, internal organs, bottles/boxes) is critical for real-world applications such as food processing, robotic surgery, and household automation. However, developing grasp strategies for such objects is uniquely challenging. Unlike rigid
The automated cleaning of surfaces such as furniture, bathroom sinks, and even human bodies is challenging due to the three-dimensional nature of their geometries. Yet, enabling robots to effectively and safely perform these tasks would not only reduce user efforts spent on household cleaning chores…
Deformable solid objects such as clay or dough are prevalent in industrial and home environments. However, robotic manipulation of such objects has largely remained unexplored in literature due to the high complexity involved in representing and modeling their deformation. This work addresses the pr…
Soft optical tactile sensors enable robots to manipulate deformable objects by capturing important features such as high-resolution contact geometry and estimations of object compliance. This work presents a variable stiffness soft tactile end-effector called StRETcH, a Soft to Resistive Elastic Tac…
If robots and humans are to coexist and cooperate in society, it would be useful for robots to be able to engage in tactile interactions. Touch is an intuitive communication tool as well as a fundamental method by which we assist each other physically. Tactile abilities are challenging to engineer i…
Granular media (e.g., cereal grains, plastic resin pellets, and pills) are ubiquitous in robotics-integrated industries, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical development. This prevalence mandates the accurate and efficient simulation of these materials. This work presents a softwar…
Deploying robot learning frameworks in unconstrained environments requires robustness and tractability. We must not only equip the robot with a sufficient range of sensing capabilities, but also provide training data in a sample-efficient manner. To this end, we identify and address a need specifica…
Sound is an information-rich medium that captures dynamic physical events. This work presents STReSSD, a framework that uses sound to bridge the simulation-to-reality gap for stochastic dynamics, demonstrated for the canonical case of a bouncing ball. A physically-motivated noise model is presented
As the demand for robotic applications in unconstrained and dynamic environments rises, so does the benefit of advancing the state of the art in soft robotic technologies. However, the complex capabilities of soft robots elicited by their high-dimensional, non-linear characteristics simultaneously y…
At the core of most three-dimensional alignment and tracking tasks resides the critical problem of point correspondence. In this context, the design of descriptors that efficiently and uniquely identifies keypoints, to be matched, is of central importance. Numerous descriptors have been developed fo…
Service robots will require several important manipulation skills, including the ability to accurately measure and pour liquids. Prior work on robotic liquid pouring has primarily focused on visual techniques for sensing liquids, but these techniques fall short when liquids are obscured by opaque or…
Despite the impressive progress being made in autonomous vehicles, human drivers will remain ubiquitous in the imminent years. Therefore, intelligent hybrid vehicular systems must be aware of the interactions between humans and the environment (e.g., sound, vibration, speed, etc.). In this paper, we…
Surface electromyography is currently the sensing modality of choice for control of biosignal-driven prostheses and exoskeletons; however, the sensor's noisy and aggregate nature inhibits collection of distinguishable signal streams to robustly manipulate multiple device degrees of freedom (DoF). We…
Surface electromyography is currently the sensing modality of choice for control of biosignal-driven prostheses and exoskeletons; however, the sensor's noisy and aggregate nature inhibits collection of distinguishable signal streams to robustly manipulate multiple device degrees of freedom (DoF). We
Our goal is for people to be physically comfortable when taking objects from robots. This puts a burden on the robot to hand over the object in such a way that a person can easily reach it, without needing to strain or twist their arm - a way that is conducive to ergonomic human grasping configurati…
Soft material robots are attractive for safe interaction with humans and unstructured environments due to their compliance and low intrinsic stiffness and mass. These properties enable new capabilities such as the ability to conform to environmental geometry for tactile sensing and to undergo large…
Given the current capabilities of autonomous vehicles, one can easily imagine autonomy released on the road in the near future. However, it can be assumed that the transition will not be instantaneous, meaning they will have to be capable of driving well in a mixed environment, with both humans and…
In order to develop provably safe human-in-the-loop systems, accurate and precise models of human behavior must be developed. Driving is a good example of such a system because the driver has full control of the vehicle, and her likely actions are highly dependent on her mental state and the context…
Existing commercial driver assistance systems, including automatic braking systems and lane-keeping systems, may monitor the state of the vehicle or the environment to determine whether the systems should intervene. However, the state of the human driver is not typically included in the decision mak…
Assistive devices such as exoskeletons are capable of providing rehabilitative improvement and independence for individuals suffering from musculoskeletal conditions. Typical devices use either active assistance methods such as DC motors or passive methods such as springs. Active methods require a c…
We present a framework for parameter and state estimation of personalized human kinematic models from motion capture data. These models can be used to optimize a variety of human-robot collaboration scenarios for the comfort or ergonomics of an individual human collaborator. Our approach offers two…