9 accepted papers
Uncertainties in contact dynamics and object geometry remain significant barriers to robust robotic manipulation. Caging helps mitigate these uncertainties by constraining an object’s mobility without requiring precise contact modeling. Existing caging research often treats morphology and policy opt
To develop robust manipulation policies, quantifying robustness is essential. Evaluating robustness in general manipulation, nonetheless, poses significant challenges due to complex hybrid dynamics, combinatorial explosion of possible contact interactions, global geometry, etc. This paper introduces
Planning robot dexterity is challenging due to the non-smoothness introduced by contacts, intricate fine motions, and ever-changing scenarios. We present a hierarchical planning framework for dexterous robotic manipulation (HiDex). This framework explores in-hand and extrinsic dexterity by leveragin
With advances in generative AI, there is now potential for autonomous agents to manage daily tasks via natural language commands. However, current agents are primarily created and tested in simplified synthetic environments, leading to a disconnect with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we build…
This paper presents Contact Mode Guided Manipulation Planning (CMGMP) for 3D quasistatic and quasi-dynamic rigid body motion planning in dexterous manipulation. The CMGMP algorithm generates hybrid motion plans including both continuous state transitions and discrete contact mode switches, without t…
This paper explores a novel approach to dexterous manipulation, aimed at levels of speed, precision, robustness, and simplicity suitable for practical deployment. The enabling technology is a Direct-drive Hand (DDHand) comprising two fingers, two DOFs each, that exhibit high speed and a light touch.…
Robots need to manipulate objects in constrained environments like shelves and cabinets when assisting humans in everyday settings like homes and offices. These constraints make manipulation difficult by reducing grasp accessibility, so robots need to use non-prehensile strategies that leverage obje…
The discontinuities and multi-modality introduced by contacts make manipulation planning challenging. Many previous works avoid this problem by pre-designing a set of high-level motion primitives like grasping and pushing. However, such motion primitives are often not adequate to describe dexterous…
Hundreds of billions of small screws are assembled in consumer electronics industry every year, yet reliably automating the screwdriving process remains one of the most challenging tasks. Two barriers to further adoption of robotic threaded fastening systems are system cost and technical challenges,…