The development of future technologies can be highly influenced by our deeper
understanding of the principles that underlie living organisms. The Living Machines …

We consider a novel problem where multiple rigid convex polygonal objects rest in randomly
placed positions and orientations on a planar surface visible from an overhead camera. The …

We introduce GRiD: a GPU-accelerated library for computing rigid body dynamics with
analytical gradients. GRiD was designed to accelerate the nonlinear trajectory opti-mization …

The force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several
decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of …

Humans, in comparison to robots, are remarkably adept at reaching for objects in cluttered
environments. The best existing robot planners are based on random sampling of …

Planning contact interactions is one of the core challenges of many robotic tasks. Optimizing
contact locations while taking dynamics into account is computationally costly and, in …

Recently, robots have seen rapidly increasing use in homes and warehouses to declutter by
collecting objects from a planar surface and placing them into a container. While current …

A key component of many robotics model-based planning and control algorithms is physics
predictions, that is, forecasting a sequence of states given an initial state and a sequence of …

Pushing is an essential non-prehensile manipulation skill used for tasks ranging from pre-
grasp manipulation to scene rearrangement, reasoning about object relations in the scene …

3D object reconfiguration encompasses common robot manipulation tasks in which a set of
objects must be moved through a series of physically feasible state changes into a desired …