For many promising application areas, autonomous mobile manipulators do not yet exhibit sufficiently robust performance. We propose the use of tags applied to task-relevant locations in human environments in order to help ...

A large variety of doors and drawers can be found within human environments. Humans regularly operate these mechanisms without difficulty, even if they have not previously interacted with a particular door or drawer. In ...

In this work we present a set of integrated methods that enable an RFID-enabled mobile manipulator to approach and grasp an object to which a self-adhesive passive (battery-free) UHF RFID tag has been affixed. Our primary ...

Within this paper we present a set of behaviors that enable a mobile manipulator to reliably open a variety of doors. After a user designates a location within 20cm of the door handle, the robot autonomously locates the ...

We are developing an autonomous mobile assistive robot named El-E to help individuals with severe motor impairments by performing various object manipulation tasks such as fetching, transporting, placing, and delivering. ...

Delivering an object to a user would be a generally useful capability for service robots. Within this paper, we look at this capability in the context of assistive object retrieval for motor-impaired users. We first describe ...

Unstructured, human environments present great challenges and opportunities for robotic manipulation and grasping. Robots that reliably grasp household objects with unknown or uncertain properties would be especially useful, ...

Studies have consistently shown that object retrieval would be a valuable task for assistive robots to perform, yet detailed information about the needs of patients with respect to this task has been lacking. In this paper, ...