16 accepted papers
Humanoid and legged robots interact with the environment through intermittent contacts, making accurate motion estimation fundamentally dependent on reasoning about contact dynamics. However, standard sensing pipelines—whether based on onboard proprioception with Extended Kalman Filters (EKFs) or ex…
Contact-rich bimanual manipulation involves precise coordination of two arms to change object states through strategically selected contacts and motions. Due to the inherent complexity of these tasks, acquiring sufficient demonstration data and training policies that generalize to unseen scenarios r…
Designing planners and controllers for contact-rich manipulation is extremely challenging as contact violates the smoothness conditions that many gradient-based controller synthesis tools assume. Contact smoothing approximates a non-smooth system with a smooth one, allowing one to use these synthesi
We present a low-cost data generation pipeline that integrates physics-based simulation, human demonstrations, and model-based planning to efficiently generate large-scale, high-quality datasets for contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks. Starting with a small number of embodiment-flexible human de…
Autonomous tracking represents a significant advancement in the evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), offering applications in areas such as aerial photography and infrastructure inspection. Despite its potential, many autonomous tracking systems encounter challenges in maintaining consisten
The tremendous success of behavior cloning (BC) in robotic manipulation has been largely confined to tasks where demonstrations can be effectively collected through human teleoperation. However, demonstrations for contact-rich manipulation tasks that require complex coordination of multiple contacts
The advent of large language models (LLMs) has gained tremendous attention over the past year. Previous studies have shown the astonishing performance of LLMs not only in other tasks but also in emotion recognition in terms of accuracy, universality, explanation, robustness, few/zero-shot learning,…
Heart murmurs are a common manifestation of cardiovascular diseases and can provide crucial clues to early cardiac abnormalities. While most current research methods primarily focus on the accuracy of models, they often overlook other important aspects such as the interpretability of machine learnin…
The empirical success of derivative-free methods in reinforcement learning for planning through contact seems at odds with the perceived fragility of classical gradient-based optimization methods in these domains. What is causing this gap, and how might we use the answer to improve gradient-based me
We believe that the future of robot motion planning will look very different than how it looks today: instead of complex collision avoidance trajectories with a brittle dependence on sensing and estimation of the environment, motion plans should consist of smooth, simple trajectories and be executed…
We propose the framework of Series Elastic End Effectors in 6D (SEED), which combines a spatially compliant element with visuotactile sensing to grasp and manipulate tools in the wild. Our framework generalizes the benefits of series elasticity to 6-dof, while providing an abstraction of control usi…
Motion planning for robotic manipulation makes heavy use of quasistatic models, but these same models have not yet proven useful for simulation. This is because in many multi-contact situations, the quasistatic models do not describe a unique next state for the system. A planner is able to use these…
The ability to detect and estimate external contacts is essential for robot arms to operate in unstructured environments occupied by humans. However, most robot arms are not equipped with adequate sensors to detect contacts on their entire body. What many robot arms do have is torque sensors for ind…
An effective scheme to simulate low-speed, contact-rich manipulation tasks is to assume quasistatic physics and advance system states by solving linear complementarity problems (LCPs). However, the existing LCP-based quasistatic time-stepping scheme fails to simulate grasping-an essential motion pri…
In Japan, inspection of irrigation water canals has been mostly conducted manually. However, the huge demand for more regular inspections as infrastructure ages, coupled with the limited time window available for inspection, has rendered manual inspection increasingly insufficient. With shortened in…