26 accepted papers
Learning from demonstration effectively transfers human manipulation skills to robots. It can be especially useful for imitating industrial manipulation tasks which are performed by humans and are difficult to model such as deformable object manipulation. Manipulation of deformable objects often req…
This paper addresses the problem of surrounding and tracking dynamic groups of moving targets with unknown velocities using a team of mobile robots. We introduce a control strategy for multi-robot systems that continuously maintains a safety distance between each robot and the convex hull of the tar
Understanding the environment is crucial for autonomous robots to perform navigation and manipulation tasks. Never-seen-before objects may have complex appearances and dynamics, where only physical interactions can help to identify visually hidden properties like mass or friction. In this work we pr
This paper describes a new type of soft robotic grippers with variable stiffness to grasp efficiently a wide variety of objects. The gripper includes two sections, a pneumatic chamber for actuation and a tipping section for adjusting stiffness and shape adaptation. The tipping section consists of Ma
In mini-invasive surgery, the laparoscopic ultra-sound probe is visible in the laparoscopic image. We address the problem of estimating the probe pose with respect to the laparoscope without using markers and additional sensors. We propose the first method using a single standard laparoscopic monocu
In mini-invasive surgery, the laparoscopic ultra-sound probe is visible in the laparoscopic image. We address the problem of estimating the probe pose with respect to the laparoscope without using markers and additional sensors. We propose the first method using a single standard laparoscopic monocu…
Robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) has great potential for applications in diverse fields such as agriculture or industry. However, a major challenge lies in acquiring accurate deformation models that describe the relationship between robot motion and DLO deformations. Such mod
Visuotactile sensors have gained attention during the last years in robotics because they are able to reconstruct with high precision the 3D contact shape (or mesh) between the robotic fingers and the object. A new slip detection and avoidance algorithm is proposed based on the dynamic variation of
We present a formation controller for a team of mobile robots, modelled with double-integrator dynamics, to manipulate deformable objects grasped around their contour. The manipulation task is defined as reaching a target configuration consisting of a desired shape, scale, position and orientation o
Dynamic movement primitives (DMPs) provide an effective method of learning manipulation skills from human demonstration. DMPs can be especially useful for imitating industrial manipulation tasks which are performed by humans and are difficult to model, for instance, deformable object manipulation. I…
We propose a new approach to control the shape of deformable objects with robots. Specifically, we consider a fixed-length elastic linear object lying on a 2D workspace. Our main idea is to encode the object's deformation behavior in an offline constant Jacobian matrix. To derive this Jacobian, we u…
Shape servoing is the problem of controlling the shape of a deformable object via robotic manipulation, exploiting sensory feedback. In many shape servoing scenarios of practical interest, the object has a natural tendency to preserve local rigidity. Motivated by this observation, we propose to use
Deformable object grasping has great potential to improve the versatility of robotic manipulation and extend the applications of robotics. It has thus attracted more and more attentions and efforts from robotic community. Nevertheless, the deformation of objects during grasping leads to difficulties
The papers in this special section focus on robotic handling of deformable objects. Object handling and manipulation is a recurrent theme in robotics, moving progressively from simple rigid objects to articulated objects and then complex deformable objects. In recent years, there has been a growing
This letter presents a generic coordination approach for the control of mobile manipulators. It is based on an external coupled coordination and exploits a multi-trajectory following approach. A coordination stage provides optimal offsets with respect to system sub-parts reference trajectories that
In this paper, we propose a formation control system for deforming and transporting simultaneously a de-formable object with a team of robots, modeled with double-integrator dynamics. The goal is to reach a target configuration, defined as a combination of shape, scale, orientation and position of t…
Most deformable object manipulation tasks still rely on skillful human operators. To automate such tasks, a robotic system should not only be able to deform an object to a desired shape but also servo its deformation along a specific path towards the desired shape. We propose a shape servoing contro…
This study is focused on developing a new dexterous soft robotic gripper with three fingers and an active palm capable of performing in-hand manipulation purposes. This innovative design meets all the dexterous manipulation requirements without any increase in mechanical complexity. In each finger,
This letter addresses the problem of controlling multiple robots to form a prescribed team shape in two-dimensional space. We consider a team organization in interlaced triads (i.e., groups of three robots). For each triad we define a measure of geometric deformation relative to its prescribed shape
The planning of robotic manipulation and grasping tasks depends on the reconstruction of the 3D object’s shape. Most of the existing 3D object reconstruction methods are based on visual sensing that are limited due to the lack of the object’s occluded side information. The goal of this paper is to o…
We address the monocular visual shape servoing problem. This pushes the challenging visual servoing problem one step further from rigid object manipulation towards deformable object manipulation. Explicitly, it implies deforming the object towards a desired shape in 3D space by robots using monocula…
We present a novel method to control the relative positions of the members of a robotic team. The application scenario we consider is the cooperative manipulation of a deformable object in 2D space. A typical goal in this kind of scenario is to minimize the deformation of the object with respect to…
Precise robot manipulation of deformable objects requires an accurate and fast estimation of their shape as they deform. So far, visual sensing has been mostly used to solve this issue, but vision sensors are sensitive to occlusions, which might be inevitable when manipulating an object with robot.…
An emerging application of multirobot systems is the monitoring of a dynamic event. Here, the goal is to enclose and track a moving target by attaining a desired geometric formation around it. By considering a circular pattern configuration for the target enclosing, the multirobot system is able to…
This paper shows how to push an unknown object in the plane from an initial pose to a target pose with two cooperating mobile robots. On the object motion, we deliberately impose non-holonomic velocity constraint with pushing mobile robots. This yields smooth and efficient trajectories. Pushing mani…
Incremental Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms require, in general, precise knowledge of the camera linear and angular velocities in the camera frame for estimating the 3D structure of the scene. Since an accurate measurement of the camera own motion may be a non-trivial task in several robotics…