Course Schedule 🗓️

 

Date

High-level Topic

Lecture Topic / Paper 1

Paper 2

Logistics

21-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.

23-Jan

WidowX Robot Tutorial

WidowX-250 tutorial + Q/A

28-Jan

Lecture 1: Kinematics

3D Rigid-body Motion: Rotations & Homogeneous Transformations

30-Jan

Lecture 2: Kinematics

Forward and Inverse Kinematics

 

 

4-Feb

Lecture 3: Dynamics

Rigid Body Dynamics, Manipulator Dynamics Equations

 

 

6-Feb

Lecture 4: Controls (Project Proposal Due)

Feedback Control, Operational Space, Impedance, Admittance and Hybrid Controllers

 

 

11-Feb

Project Proposals Initial Feedback

 

 

 

13-Feb

Lecture 5: Controls

Model Predictive Control, Exciting Directions and Tools for Controls

 

 

18-Feb

No Class (Feb Break)

 

 

 

20-Feb

Lecture 6: Planning

Configuration Spaces, Graph-Based Methods (A*), Sampling-Based Motion Planning (RRT)

 

 

25-Feb

Lecture 7: Planning

Task and Motion Planning, Exciting Directions and Tools for Planning

 

27-Feb

Lecture 8: Grasping

Fixtures, Closure, Grasping Overview
How to read and present a paper

 

 

4-Mar

Lecture 9: Perception

 3D Perception for Manipulation

 

 

6-Mar

Paper Presentation 1: Controls

A Review of Algorithms for Compliant Control of Stiff and Fixed-Compliance Robots (pdf)
Andrea Calanca, Riccardo Muradore, Paolo Fiorini. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. 2016.

Operational Space Control: A Theoretical and Empirical Comparison (pdf)
Jun Nakanishi, Rick Cory, Michael Mistry, Jan Peters, Stefan Schaal. International Journal of Robotics Research. 2008.

G1, G7

11-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.

 

G3

13-Mar

Paper Presentation 3: Planning

Sampling-Based Motion Planning: A Comparative Review (pdf)
Andreas Orthey, Constantinos Chamzas, and Lydia E. Kavraki. Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems. 2024.

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. 2018.

G6, G10

18-Mar

Project Mid-term Presentation

 

 

20-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.

Distilled Feature Fields Enable Few-Shot Language-Guided Manipulation (pdf)
William Shen, Ge Yang, Alan Yu, Jansen Wong, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Phillip Isola. Conference on Robot Learning. 2023.

G2, G4

25-Mar

Paper Presentation 5: Grasping

Neural Attention Field: Emerging Point Relevance in 3D Scenes for One-Shot Dexterous Grasping (pdf)
Qianxu Wang, Congyue Deng, Tyler Lum, Yuanpei Chen, Yaodong Yang, Jeannette Bohg, Yixin Zhu, Leonidas Guibas. Conference on Robot Learning. 2024.

Dex-Net (pdf)

G8, G9

27-Mar

Paper Presentation 6: In-Hand Manipulation

Extrinsic dexterity: In-hand manipulation with external forces (pdf)
Nikhil Chavan Dafle, Alberto Rodriguez, Robert Paolini, Bowei Tang, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa, Michael Erdmann. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2014.

Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation (pdf)
OpenAI et al. 2019.

G1, G5

1-Apr

No Class (Spring Break)

3-Apr

No Class (Spring Break)

8-Apr

Lecture 10: Special Topics

Robot Learning for Manipulation

10-Apr

Lecture 11: Special Topics

Robot Learning for Manipulation

15-Apr

Lecture 12: Special Topics

Dual Arm and Deformable Object Manipulation

17-Apr

Lecture 13: Special Topics

Multimodal, Active and Interactive Perception

22-Apr

Paper Presentation 7: Robot Learning for Manipulation

RoboCLIP: One Demonstration is Enough to Learn Robot Policies (pdf)
Sumedh A Sontakke, Jesse Zhang, Sébastien M. R. Arnold, Karl Pertsch, Erdem Bıyık, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn, Laurent Itti. Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. 2023.

Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation (pdf)
Jensen Gao, Bidipta Sarkar, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Jiajun Wu, Brian Ichter, Anirudha Majumdar, Dorsa Sadigh. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2024.

G4, G7

24-Apr

Paper Presentation 8: Robot Learning for Manipulation

π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control (pdf)
Physical Intelligence. 2024.

Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion (pdf)
Cheng Chi, Zhenjia Xu, Siyuan Feng, Eric Cousineau, Yilun Du, Benjamin Burchfiel, Russ Tedrake, Shuran Song. The International Journal of Robotics Research. 2024.

G6, G10

29-Apr

Paper Presentation 9: Human-in-the-Loop Manipulation

Vocal Sandbox: Continual Learning and Adaptation for Situated Human-Robot Collaboration (pdf)
Jennifer Grannen, Siddharth Karamcheti, Suvir Mirchandani, Percy Liang, Dorsa Sadigh. Conference on Robot Learning. 2024.

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.

G2, G9

1-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. Autonomous Robots. 2018.

Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware (pdf)
Tony Z. Zhao, Vikash Kumar, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn. Robotics: Science and Systems. 2023.

G5, G8

6-May

Guest Lecture / Interactive Q&A

10-May to 17-May

Final Paper
Final Presentations Due