Research Demos

Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation

Silvia Cruciani and Diogo Almeida developed a system to execute bimanual in-hand manipulation to mainain a balanced grasp on a tray. The dual-arm system is required because a single gripper cannot guarantee that the tray will be kept stable while as more and more objects are placed on it. The in-hand manipulation to reconfigure the grasp on the tray without releasing it exploits my work on Dexterous Manipulation Graphs.

More information can be found in:

• S. Cruciani, D. Almeida, D. Kragic and Y. Karayiannidis, "Discrete Bimanual Manipulation for Wrench Balancing", 2019. [manuscript]

Identifying articulated objects through cooperative manipulation

We developed a method to identify a 2 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) mechanism through interactive perception. A mechanism can be a tool commonly found in a human environment, such as a pair of scissors or pliers, or part of the environment itself, as a door or drawers.

We use force and torque sensing to estimate the directions of motion afforded by a manipulated object. Intuitively, if the mechanism's joint can't translate or rotate along a certain direction, forces/torques should be measured as a reaction to attempted motion on that direction. We leverage this to adapt our motion estimates.