Imagine that you are reaching into the fridge to grasp an object you can only partially see. Rather than relying solely on vision, you must use touch in order to localise it and securely grasp it. However, humans would not poke the object to localise it first and then grasp it. We compensate for the uncertainty by approaching the object in a way such that if a contact occurs it will generate enough information about where the object is and the object will be grasped with a mi

Our paper entitled 'Feature-Based Transfer Learning for Robotic Push Manipulation' published in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) has been selected for an extended version by the Special Issue on Advancement in Engineering and Computer Science organized by Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal (ASTESJ) Thanks to my students, Rhys Howard and Jochen Stuber, the extended paper also proposed a improvement of a twofold i

The hype about sensorimotor learning is currently reaching high fever, thanks to the latest advancement in deep learning. In this paper, we present an open-source framework for collecting large-scale, time-synchronised synthetic data from highly disparate sensory modalities, such as audio, video, and proprioception, for learning robot manipulation tasks. We demonstrate the learning of non-linear sensorimotor mappings for a humanoid drumming robot that generates novel motion s

Link to the article about our GPAtlasRRT algorithm for tactile recovering of the shape of novel objects. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/university/colleges/eps/news/2018/7/birmingham-researchers-artificial-intelligence-advance-dexterity-robots.aspx #rrt #gp #atlas #robotics #robot #tactile #exploration #touch #novelobjects #vito #boris #softhand #humanoid #ai #artificialintelligence #dexterity #universityofbirmingham #irlab #uob #pisa

I have been awarded the Ramsay Research Fund to develop a "VR-based Research Framework for Biomedical Applications" By 2020, it is estimated that there will be 120 million active users of Virtual Reality (VR) applications; nearly a fifth of whom will be used for improving healthcare solutions for patient with neuromuscular disorders (ABI report 2015). The hype about VR is currently reaching fever pitch, thanks mostly to the increased accessibility of it via solutions such as

Designing robotic assistance devices for manipulation tasks is challenging. This work is concerned with improving accuracy and usability of semi-autonomous robots, such as human operated manipulators or exoskeletons. The key insight is to develop a system that takes into account context- and user-awareness to take better decisions in how to assist the user. The context-awareness is implemented by enabling the system to automatically generate a set of candidate grasps and reac