Many assistive tasks involve manipulation near the care-receiver's body, including self-care tasks such as dressing, feeding, and personal hygiene. A robot can provide assistance with these tasks by moving its end effector ...

Moving a robot arm quickly in cluttered and unmodeled workspaces can be difficult because of the inherent risk of high impact forces. Additionally, compliance by itself is not enough to limit contact forces due to ...

We present a unique multi-antenna RFID reader (a sensor) embedded in a robot's manipulator that is designed to operate with ordinary UHF RFID tags in a short-range, near-field electromagnetic regime. Using specially designed ...

We demonstrate that data-driven methods can be used to rapidly categorize objects encountered through incidental contact on a robot arm. Allowing incidental contact with surrounding objects has benefits during manipulation ...

Assistive mobile manipulators have the potential to one day serve as surrogates and helpers for people with disabilities, giving them the freedom to perform tasks such as scratching an itch, picking up a cup, or socializing ...

Based on a lifetime of experience, people anticipate the forces associated with performing a manipulation task. In contrast, most robots lack common sense about the forces involved in everyday manipulation tasks. In this ...

Physical human-robot interaction has the potential to be useful in a number of domains, but this will depend on how people respond to the robot’s actions. For some domains, such as healthcare, a robot is likely to initiate ...

Visual features can help predict if a manipulation behavior will succeed at a given location. For example, the success of a behavior that flips light switches depends on the location of the switch. We present methods that ...

Clutter creates challenges for robot manipulation, including a lack of non-contact trajectories and reduced visibility for line-of-sight sensors. We demonstrate that robots can use whole-arm tactile sensing to perceive ...

We introduce ROS Commander (ROSCo), an open source system that enables expert users to construct, share, and deploy robot behaviors for home robots. A user builds a behavior in the form of a Hierarchical Finite State Machine ...