30 accepted papers
Dexterous in-hand manipulation remains a long-standing challenge in robotics, primarily due to the complex contact dynamics and partial observability. While humans synergize vision and touch for such tasks, robotic approaches often prioritize one modality, therefore limiting adaptability. This paper…
Recent advancements in visual-inertial motion capture systems have demonstrated the potential of combining monocular cameras with sparse inertial measurement units (IMUs) as cost-effective solutions, which effectively mitigate occlusion and drift issues inherent in single-modality systems. However, …
This study introduces a novel language-guided diffusion-based learning framework, DexTOG, aimed at advancing the field of task-oriented grasping (TOG) with dexterous hands. Unlike existing methods that mainly focus on 2-finger grippers, this research addresses the complexities of dexterous manipulat
We present ViTaM-D, a novel visual-tactile framework for reconstructing dynamic hand-object interaction with distributed tactile sensing to enhance contact modeling. Existing methods, relying solely on visual inputs, often fail to capture occluded interactions and object deformation. To address this…
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, their reliance on parametric knowledge often leads to factual inaccuracies. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates this by leveraging external documents, yet existing approaches treat retrieved passages as isolated chunk
Accurate hand motion capture (MoCap) is vital for applications in robotics, virtual reality, and biomechanics, yet existing systems face limitations in capturing high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) joint kinematics and personalized hand shape. Commercial gloves offer up to 21 DoFs, which are insufficient f
Hand-eye calibration aims to estimate the transformation between a camera and a robot. Traditional methods rely on fiducial markers, which require considerable manual effort and precise setup. Recent advances in deep learning have introduced markerless techniques but come with more prerequisites, su
Generative diffusion models have shown empirical successes in point cloud resampling, generating a denser and more uniform distribution of points from sparse or noisy 3D point clouds by progressively refining noise into structure. However, existing diffusion models employ manually predefined schemes…
Grasp planning is an important task for robotic manipulation. Though it is a richly studied area, a standalone, fast, and differentiable grasp planner that can work with robot grippers of different DOFs has not been reported. In this work, we present DiPGrasp, a grasp planner that satisfies all thes
In the realm of robotic cloth manipulation, accurately estimating the cloth state during or post-execution is imperative. However, the inherent complexities in a cloth's dynamic behavior and its near-infinite degrees of freedom (DoF) pose significant challenges. Traditional methods have been restric
Fluid interactions are crucial in daily tasks, with properties like density and viscosity being key parameters. The property states can be used as control signals for robot operation. While density estimation is simple, assessing viscosity, especially for different fluid types, is complex. This stud…
This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantee, and frictional contact modeling, with acceptable runtime suitable for l
This work proposes a novel learning framework for visual hand dynamics analysis that takes into account the physiological aspects of hand motion. The existing models which are simplified joint-actuated systems often produce unnatural motions. To address this we integrate a musculoskeletal system wit…
Transparent objects are widely used in our daily lives, making it important to teach robots to interact with them. However, it's not easy because the reflective and refractive effects can make depth cameras fail to give accurate geometry measurements. To solve this problem, this paper introduces RFT
Tactile perception stands as a critical sensory modality for human interaction with the environment. Among various tactile sensor techniques, optical sensor-based approaches have gained traction, notably for producing high-resolution tactile images. This letter explores gel elastomer deformation sim
Garments are important and pervasive in daily life. However, visual analysis on them for pose estimation is challenging because it requires recovering the complete configurations of garments, which is difficult, if not impossible, to annotate in the real world. In this work, we propose a recording s…
Multiphysics phenomena, the coupling effects involving different aspects of physics laws, are pervasive in the real world and can often be encountered when performing everyday household tasks. Intelligent agents which seek to assist or replace human laborers will need to learn to cope with such phe…
Garments are important to humans. A visual system that can estimate and track the complete garment pose can be useful for many downstream tasks and real-world applications. In this work, we present a complete package to address the category-level garment pose tracking task: (1) A recording system VR…
This work presents a novel tactile perception-based method, named T-NT, for performing the needle-threading task, an application of deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation. This task is divided into two main stages: \textit{Tail-end Finding} and \textit{Tail-end Insertion}. In the first stage, t…
This paper explores the development of UniFolding, a sample-efficient, scalable, and generalizable robotic system for unfolding and folding various garments. UniFolding employs the proposed UFONet neural network to integrate unfolding and folding decisions into a single policy model that is adaptab…
Tactile sensing is one of the modalities human rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at contact area, and indicates hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT…
Human life is populated with articulated objects. A comprehensive understanding of articulated objects, namely appearance, structure, physics property, and semantics, will benefit many research communities. As current articulated object understanding solutions are usually based on synthetic object d…
Estimating the articulated 3D hand-object pose from a single RGB image is a highly ambiguous and challenging problem, requiring large-scale datasets that contain diverse hand poses, object types, and camera viewpoints. Most real-world datasets lack these diversities. In contrast, data synthesis can…
We present RCareWorld, a human-centric simulation world for physical and social robotic caregiving designed with inputs from stakeholders. RCareWorld has realistic human models of care recipients with mobility limitations and caregivers, home environments with multiple levels of accessibility and as…
We aim to build a useful, reproducible, democratized benchmark for learning household robotic manipulation from human videos. To realize this goal, a diverse, high-quality human video dataset curated specifically for robots is desired. To evaluate the learning progress, a simulated twin environment…
Building general-purpose robots to perform a diverse range of tasks in a large variety of environments in the physical world at the human level is extremely challenging. According to [1], it requires the robot learning to be sample-efficient, generalizable, compositional, and incremental. In this wo…
Modeling the hand-object (HO) interaction not only requires estimation of the HO pose, but also pays attention to the contact due to their interaction. Significant progress has been made in estimating hand and object separately with deep learning methods, simultaneous HO pose estimation and contact…
Object handover is a common human collaboration behavior that attracts attention from researchers in Robotics and Cognitive Science. Though visual perception plays an important role in the object handover task, the whole handover process has been specifically explored. In this work, we propose a nov…
In this paper, we propose a novel top-down instance segmentation framework based on explicit shape encoding, named ESE-Seg. It largely reduces the computational consumption of the instance segmentation by explicitly decoding the multiple object shapes with tensor operations, thus performs the instan…
Instance segmentation is a problem of significance in computer vision. However, preparing annotated data for this task is extremely time-consuming and costly. By combining the advantages of 3D scanning, reasoning, and GAN-based domain adaptation techniques, we introduce a novel pipeline named SRDA t…