21 accepted papers
We study the problem of functional retargeting: learning dexterous manipulation policies to track object states from human hand-object demonstrations. We focus on long-horizon, bimanual tasks with articulated objects, which are challenging due to large action space, spatiotemporal discontinuities, a…
Simulation-based learning has enabled policies for precise, contact-rich tasks (e.g., robotic assembly) to reach high success rates (~80%) under high levels of observation noise and control error. Although such performance may be sufficient for research applications, it falls short of industry stand…
Robotic assembly presents a long-standing challenge due to its requirement for precise, contact-rich manipulation. While simulation-based learning has enabled the development of robust assembly policies, their performance often degrades when deployed in real-world settings due to the sim-to-real gap…
We present FORGE, a method for sim-to-real transfer of force-aware manipulation policies in the presence of significant pose uncertainty. During simulation-based policy learning, FORGE combines a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">force
Robotic assembly remains a significant challenge due to complexities in visual perception, functional grasping, contact-rich manipulation, and performing high-precision tasks. Simulation-based learning and sim-to-real transfer have led to recent success in solving assembly tasks in the presence of o
Accurate and efficient simulation of modern robots remains challenging due to their high degrees of freedom and intricate mechanisms. Neural simulators have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional analytical simulators, capable of efficiently predicting complex dynamics and adapting to rea…
Diffusion models, praised for their success in generative tasks, are increasingly being applied to robotics, demonstrating exceptional performance in behavior cloning. However, their slow generation process stemming from iterative denoising steps poses a challenge for real-time applications in resou…
Endowing robots with tool design abilities is critical for enabling them to solve complex manipulation tasks that would otherwise be intractable. While recent generative frameworks can automatically synthesize task settings—such as 3D scenes and reward functions—they have not yet addressed the chall…
Enabling robots to learn novel tasks in a data-efficient manner is a long-standing challenge. Common strategies involve carefully leveraging prior experiences, especially transition data collected on related tasks. Although much progress has been made for general pick-and-place manipulation, far few…
Robotic assembly for high-mixture settings requires adaptivity to diverse parts and poses, which is an open challenge. Meanwhile, in other areas of robotics, large models and sim-to-real have led to tremendous progress. Inspired by such work, we present AutoMate, a learning framework and system that…
Recent work has demonstrated the ability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to learn complex robotic behaviours in simulation, including in the domain of multi-fingered manipulation. However, such models can be challenging to transfer to the real world due to the gap between simulation a…
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…
Imitation learning from a large set of human demonstrations has proved to be an effective paradigm for building capable robot agents. However, the demonstrations can be extremely costly and time-consuming to collect. We introduce MimicGen, a system for automatically synthesizing large-scale, rich da…
Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent problems such as local minima and exploding/vanishing numeric…
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
Robotic assembly is one of the oldest and most challenging applications of robotics. In other areas of robotics, such as perception and grasping, simulation has rapidly accelerated research progress, particularly when combined with modern deep learning. However, accurately, efficiently, and robustly…
Tactile sensing is critical for robotic grasping and manipulation of objects under visual occlusion. However, in contrast to simulations of robot arms and cameras, current simulations of tactile sensors have limited accuracy, speed, and utility. In this work, we develop an efficient 3D finite elemen…
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…
High-density afferents in the human hand have long been regarded as essential for human grasping and manipulation abilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors are typically used to provide low-density contact data, such as center-of-pressure and resultant force. Although useful, this data does no…
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
Researchers have developed variable-impedance mechanisms to control the dynamic response of robotic systems and improve their adaptivity, robustness, and efficiency. However, these mechanisms have limitations in size, cost, and convenience, particularly for variable damping. We demonstrate that lami