Objects within human environments are usually found on flat surfaces that are orthogonal to gravity, such as floors, tables, and shelves. We first present a new assistive robot that is explicitly designed to take advantage ...

Assistive mobile robots that autonomously manipulate objects within everyday settings have the potential to improve the lives of the elderly, injured, and disabled. Within this paper, we present the most recent version of ...

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 present a novel interface for human-robot interaction that enables a human to intuitively and unambiguously se- lect a 3D location in the world and communicate it to a mo- bile robot. The human points at a location of ...

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 ...

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 ...

Retrieval of dropped objects has consistently been ranked as a high priority task for assistive robots. We have previously presented a dustpan-inspired end effector capable of robustly grasping objects from the floor. In ...