Course Schedule 🗓️

 

Date	High-level Topic	Lecture Topic / Paper 1	Paper 2	Logistics
23-Jan	Introduction	Overview of Robot Manipulation and how it evolved, videos, open challenges and trends (Refer: Towards Robotic Manipulation [pdf] by Matthew T. Mason). Course Structure, Expectations, Grading, Final Project etc.		Prof. Tapo Bhattacharjee
25-Jan	WidowX Robot Tutorial	WidowX-250 tutorial + Q/A		Rajat Kumar Jenamani
30-Jan	Lecture 1: Kinematics	3D Rigid-body Motion: Rotations & Homogeneous Transformations
1-Feb	Lecture 2: Kinematics	Forward and Inverse Kinematics
6-Feb	Lecture 3: Dynamics	Rigid Body Dynamics, Manipulator Dynamics Equations
8-Feb	Lecture 4: Controls (Project Proposal Due)	Feedback Control, Operational Space, Impedance, Admittance and Hybrid Controllers
13-Feb	Project Proposals Initial Feedback
15-Feb	Lecture 5: Controls	Model Predictive Control, Exciting Directions and Tools for Controls
20-Feb	Lecture 6: Planning	Configuration Spaces, Graph-Based Methods (A*), Sampling-Based Motion Planning (RRT)
22-Feb	Lecture 7: Planning	Task and Motion Planning, Exciting Directions and Tools for Planning
27-Feb	No Class (Feb Break)
29-Feb	Lecture 8: Perception	3D Perception for Manipulation
5-Mar	Lecture 9: Grasping	Fixtures, Closure, Grasping Overview How to read and present a paper
7-Mar	Paper Presentation 1: Controls	Impedance Control: An Approach to Manipulation: Part II—Implementation (pdf) Neville Mogan. 1985.	A unified approach for motion and force control of robot manipulators: The operational space formulation (pdf) O. Khatib. Journal on Robotics and Automation. 1987	G7, G10
12-Mar	Paper Presentation 2: Controls	Dynamical Movement Primitives: Learning Attractor Models for Motor Behaviors (pdf) Auke Jan Ijspeert, Jun Nakanishi, Heiko Hoffmann, Peter Pastor, Stefan Schaal. Neural Computation. 2013.		G1
14-Mar	Paper Presentation 3: Planning	CHOMP: Covariant Hamiltonian Optimization for Motion Planning (pdf) Nathan Ratliff, Matt Zucker, J. Andrew Bagnell, Siddhartha Srinivasa. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2009.	Differentiable Physics and Stable Modes for Tool-Use and Manipulation Planning (pdf) Marc Toussaint, Kelsey R. Allen, Kevin A. Smith, Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Robotics: Science and Systems. 2014.	G2, G8
19-Mar	Project Mid-term Presentation
21-Mar	Paper Presentation 4: Grasping	The GRASP Taxonomy of Human Grasp Types (pdf) Thomas Feix, Javier Romero, Heinz-Bodo Schmiedmayer, Aaron M. Dollar, Danica Kragic. IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems. 2016.	Autonomous manipulation with a general-purpose simple hand (pdf) Matthew T. Mason, Alberto Rodriguez, Siddhartha Srinivasa and Andres S. Vazquez. International Journal of Robotics Research. 2008	G4, G6
26-Mar	Paper Presentation 5: Grasping	Robotic Grasping of Novel Objects using Vision (pdf) Ashutosh Saxena, Justin Driemeyer, Andrew Y. Ng. International Journal of Robotics Research. 2008.	Dex-Net (pdf)	G3, G9
28-Mar	Paper Presentation 6: In-Hand Manipulation	Extrinsic dexterity: In-hand manipulation with external forces (pdf) Nikhil Chavan Dafle, Alberto Rodriguez, R. Paolini, Bowei Tang, S. Srinivasa, M. Erdmann, M. T. Mason, Ivan Lundberg, H. Staab, T. Fuhlbrigge. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2014.	Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation (pdf) OpenAI. International Journal of Robotics Research. 2020.	G10, G5
2-Apr	No Class (Spring Break)
4-Apr	No Class (Spring Break)
9-Apr	Lecture 10: Special Topics	Robot Learning for Manipulation
11-Apr	Lecture 11: Special Topics	Robot Learning for Manipulation
16-Apr	Lecture 12: Special Topics	Dual Arm and Deformable Object Manipulation
18-Apr	Lecture 13: Special Topics	Multimodal, Active and Interactive Perception
23-Apr	Paper Presentation 7: Robot Learning for Manipulation	Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learning (pdf) Andy Zeng, Shuran Song, Stefan Welker, Johnny Lee, Alberto Rodriguez, Thomas Funkhouser. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. 2018.	SE3-nets: Learning rigid body motion using deep neural networks (pdf) Arunkumar Byravan and Dieter Fox. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2017.	G8, G3
25-Apr	Paper Presentation 8: Robot Learning for Manipulation	Reinforcement and Imitation Learning for Diverse Visuomotor Skills (pdf) Yuke Zhu, Ziyu Wang, Josh Merel, Andrei Rusu, Tom Erez, Serkan Cabi, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, János Kramár, Raia Hadsell, Nando de Freitas, Nicolas Heess. Robotics: Science and Systems. 2018.	Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion (pdf) Cheng Chi, Siyuan Feng, Yilun Du, Zhenjia Xu, Eric Cousineau, Benjamin Burchfiel, Shuran Song. Robotics: Science and Systems 2023.	G9, G2
30-Apr	Paper Presentation 9: Human-in-the-Loop Manipulation	Shared Autonomy via Hindsight Optimization (pdf) Shervin Javdani, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa, J. Andrew Bagnell. Robotics: Science and Systems. 2015.	Robot Learning on the Job: Human-in-the-Loop Autonomy and Learning During Deployment (pdf) Huihan Liu, Soroush Nasiriany, Lance Zhang, Zhiyao Bao, Yuke Zhu. Robotics: Science and Systems 2023.	G7, G5
2-May	Paper Presentation 10: Manipulation Systems	Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems (pdf) Clemens Eppner, Sebastian Höfer, Rico Jonschkowski, Roberto Martín-Martín, Arne Sieverling, Vincent Wall, Oliver Brock. Robotics: Science and Systems. 2012.	MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play (pdf) Chen Wang, Linxi Fan, Jiankai Sun, Ruohan Zhang, Li Fei-Fei, Danfei Xu, Yuke Zhu, Anima Anandkumar. Conference on Robot Learning 2023.	G4, G6
7-May	Guest Lecture / Interactive QnA	Matthew T. Mason		Upson 216
14-May	Final Presentations	20 minutes (15 min presentation + 5 min QnA)		10am - 3pm Gates 114
18-May	Final Paper Due	IEEE ICRA Conference Format		Before 5:00 PM Gradescope