Alberto Rodríguez

We introduce a novel approach that combines tactile estimation and control for in-hand object manipulation. By integrating measurements from robot kinematics and an image-based tactile sensor, our framework estimates and tracks object pose while simultaneously generating motion plans in a receding horizon fashion to control the pose of a grasped object. This approach consists of a discrete pose estimator that tracks the most likely sequence of object poses in a coarsely discretized grid, and a continuous pose estimator-controller to refine the pose estimate and accurately manipulate the pose of the grasped object. Our method is tested on diverse objects and configurations, achieving desired manipulation objectives and outperforming single-shot methods in estimation accuracy. The proposed approach holds potential for tasks requiring precise manipulation and limited intrinsic in-hand dexterity under visual occlusion, laying the foundation for closed-loop behavior in applications such as regrasping, insertion, and tool use. Please see supplementary multimedia for videos of real-world demonstrations.

In this paper, we use our MIT Multidisciplinary Simulation, Estimation, and Assimilation Systems (MSEAS) including Error Subspace Statistical Estimation (ESSE) largeensemble forecasting to provide real-time probabilistic forecasts for the Gulf of Mexico during the collaborative GRand Adaptive Sampling Experiment (GRASE) from April to September 2025. These forecasts are used for optimal planning and adaptive sampling for multiple platforms deployed during the experiment. We highlight real-time forecasts for probabilistic glider reachability and optimal planning. We showcase mutual information forecasts for optimal adaptive sampling with gliders and floats, maximizing information about the Loop Current (LC) and its eddies (LCEs). We showcase reachability and flow map forecasts for floats, characterizing water mass transports and eddy filamentations. We present probabilistic LCE forecasts using clustering techniques. Finally, we guide two gliders to recovery points using reachability and heading forecasts.

Existing robotic systems have a tension between generality and precision. Deployed solutions for robotic manipulation tend to fall into the paradigm of one robot solving a single task, lacking "precise generalization," or the ability to solve many tasks without compromising on precision. This paper explores solutions for precise and general pick and place. In precise pick and place, or kitting, the robot transforms an unstructured arrangement of objects into an organized arrangement, which can facilitate further manipulation. We propose SimPLE (Simulation to Pick Localize and placE) as a solution to precise pick and place. SimPLE learns to pick, regrasp, and place objects given the object's computer-aided design model and no prior experience. We developed three main components: task-aware grasping, visuotactile perception, and regrasp planning. Task-aware grasping computes affordances of grasps that are stable, observable, and favorable to placing. The visuotactile perception model relies on matching real observations against a set of simulated ones through supervised learning to estimate a distribution of likely object poses. Last, we computed a multistep pick-and-place plan by solving a shortest-path problem on a graph of hand-to-hand regrasps. On a dual-arm robot equipped with visuotactile sensing, SimPLE demonstrated pick and place of 15 diverse objects. The objects spanned a wide range of shapes, and SimPLE achieved successful placements into structured arrangements with 1-mm clearance more than 90% of the time for six objects and more than 80% of the time for 11 objects.

We introduce a novel approach that combines tactile estimation and control for in-hand object manipulation. By integrating measurements from robot kinematics and an image-based tactile sensor, our framework estimates and tracks object pose while simultaneously generating motion plans in a receding horizon fashion to control the pose of a grasped object. This approach consists of a discrete pose estimator that tracks the most likely sequence of object poses in a coarsely discretized grid, and a continuous pose estimator-controller to refine the pose estimate and accurately manipulate the pose of the grasped object. Our method is tested on diverse objects and configurations, achieving desired manipulation objectives and outperforming single-shot methods in estimation accuracy. The proposed approach holds potential for tasks requiring precise manipulation and limited intrinsic in-hand dexterity under visual occlusion, laying the foundation for closed-loop behavior in applications such as regrasping, insertion, and tool use. Please see this url for videos of real-world demonstrations.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) recognizes that more than 90% of vehicle accidents might have been caused by human factors.In this aspect, autonomous driving, in some cases, could save lives.For the safety and functionality of autonomous driving, there have been active R&D (Research and Development) projects in academia and industry.To target autonomous car research, a capstone project with four undergraduate engineering students at Texas A&M University was created in Fall 2020.By the motivation of creating a capstone project that is related to the development of an educational autonomous car simulator.As a phase 1, four Engineering Technology (ET) students have formed a team in Fall 2020 and one ET faculty member advised this team, they concluded their work in Spring 2021.The task for this capstone project was to develop a driving simulator that can investigate how an autonomous driving experience might affect the passengers of a vehicle.This measured data can be used to understand how autonomous driving affects the passenger of the vehicle through this autonomous car simulation system.For the software side, the main components consist of the car simulation, eye tracker software, and sensor data processing.The car simulation software was created using Unity 3D platform.The car simulation receives the control data from the steering wheel and pedals.The results of the heart rate and eye tracking are stored, and they can be retrieved after the simulation is completed.In this paper, the details of the integration of the driver simulator hardware and software as well as the educational values via this capstone experience will be presented.

We introduce a novel approach that combines tactile estimation and control for in-hand object manipulation. By integrating measurements from robot kinematics and an image-based tactile sensor, our framework estimates and tracks object pose while simultaneously generating motion plans to control the pose of a grasped object. This approach consists of a discrete pose estimator that uses the Viterbi decoding algorithm to find the most likely sequence of object poses in a coarsely discretized grid, and a continuous pose estimator-controller to refine the pose estimate and accurately manipulate the pose of the grasped object. Our method is tested on diverse objects and configurations, achieving desired manipulation objectives and outperforming single-shot methods in estimation accuracy. The proposed approach holds potential for tasks requiring precise manipulation in scenarios where visual perception is limited, laying the foundation for closed-loop behavior applications such as assembly and tool use. Please see supplementary videos for real-world demonstration at https://sites.google.com/view/texterity.

Multi-step forceful manipulation tasks, such as opening a push-and-twist childproof bottle, require a robot to make various planning choices that are substantially impacted by the requirement to exert force during the task. The robot must reason over discrete and continuous choices relating to the sequence of actions, such as whether to pick up an object, and the parameters of each of those actions, such how to grasp the object. To enable planning and executing forceful manipulation, we augment an existing task and motion planner with constraints that explicitly consider torque and frictional limits, captured through the proposed forceful kinematic chain constraint. In three domains, opening a childproof bottle, twisting a nut and cutting a vegetable, we demonstrate how the system selects from among a combinatorial set of strategies. We also show how cost-sensitive planning can be used to find strategies and parameters that are robust to uncertainty in the physical parameters.

We propose a framework for optimizing a planar parallel-jaw gripper for use with multiple objects. While optimizing general-purpose grippers and contact locations for grasps are both well studied, co-optimizing grasps and the gripper geometry to execute them receives less attention. As such, our framework synthesizes grippers optimized to stably grasp sets of polygonal objects. Given a fixed number of contacts and their assignments to object faces and gripper jaws, our framework optimizes contact locations along these faces, gripper pose for each grasp, and gripper shape. Our key insights are to pose shape and contact constraints in frames fixed to the gripper jaws, and to leverage the linearity of constraints in our grasp stability and gripper shape models via an augmented Lagrangian formulation. Together, these enable a tractable nonlinear program implementation. We apply our method to several examples. The first illustrative problem shows the discovery of a geometrically simple solution where possible. In another, space is constrained, forcing multiple objects to be contacted by the same features as each other. Finally a toolset-grasping example shows that our framework applies to complex, real-world objects. We provide a physical experiment of the toolset grasps.

In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We further develop our estimator and controller to enable manipulation through more complex contact interactions, including intermittent contact between the robot/object, and multiple contacts between the object/environment. In addition, we support a larger set of contact geometries at each interface. This is accomplished through a factor graph based estimation framework that reasons about the complementary kinematic and wrench constraints of contact to predict the current contact configuration. We are aided by the incorporation of a limited amount of visual feedback; which when combined with the available F/T sensing and robot proprioception, allows us to differentiate contact modes that were previously indistinguishable. We implement this revamped framework on our manipulation platform, and demonstrate that it allows the robot to perform a wider set of manipulation tasks. This includes, using a wall as a support to re-orient an object, or regulating the contact geometry between the object and the ground. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to understand the contributions from visual and tactile feedback in our manipulation framework. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/mcubelab/pbal.

We propose a framework for optimizing a planar parallel-jaw gripper for use with multiple objects. While optimizing general-purpose grippers and contact locations for grasps are both well studied, co-optimizing grasps and the gripper geometry to execute them receives less attention. As such, our framework synthesizes grippers optimized to stably grasp sets of polygonal objects. Given a fixed number of contacts and their assignments to object faces and gripper jaws, our framework optimizes contact locations along these faces, gripper pose for each grasp, and gripper shape. Our key insights are to pose shape and contact constraints in frames fixed to the gripper jaws, and to leverage the linearity of constraints in our grasp stability and gripper shape models via an augmented Lagrangian formulation. Together, these enable a tractable nonlinear program implementation. We apply our method to several examples. The first illustrative problem shows the discovery of a geometrically simple solution where possible. In another, space is constrained, forcing multiple objects to be contacted by the same features as each other. Finally a toolset-grasping example shows that our framework applies to complex, real-world objects. We provide a physical experiment of the toolset grasps.

In this paper, we present Tac2Pose, an object-specific approach to tactile pose estimation from the first touch for known objects. Given the object geometry, we learn a tailored perception model in simulation that estimates a probability distribution over possible object poses given a tactile observation. To do so, we simulate the contact shapes that a dense set of object poses would produce on the sensor. Then, given a new contact shape obtained from the sensor, we match it against the pre-computed set using an object-specific embedding learned using contrastive learning. We obtain contact shapes from the sensor with an object-agnostic calibration step that maps RGB (red, green, blue) tactile observations to binary contact shapes. This mapping, which can be reused across object and sensor instances, is the only step trained with real sensor data. This results in a perception model that localizes objects from the first real tactile observation. Importantly, it produces pose distributions and can incorporate additional pose constraints coming from other perception systems, multiple contacts, or priors. We provide quantitative results for 20 objects. Tac2Pose provides high accuracy pose estimations from distinctive tactile observations while regressing meaningful pose distributions to account for those contact shapes that could result from different object poses. We extend and test Tac2Pose in multi-contact scenarios where two tactile sensors are simultaneously in contact with the object, as during a grasp with a parallel jaw gripper. We further show that when the output pose distribution is filtered with a prior on the object pose, Tac2Pose is often able to improve significantly on the prior. This suggests synergistic use of Tac2Pose with additional sensing modalities (e.g., vision) even in cases where the tactile observation from a grasp is not sufficiently discriminative. Given a coarse estimate of an object’s pose, even ambiguous contacts can be used to determine an object’s pose precisely. We also test Tac2Pose on object models reconstructed from a 3D scanner, to evaluate the robustness to uncertainty in the object model. We show that even in the presence of model uncertainty, Tac2Pose is able to achieve fine accuracy comparable to when the object model is the manufacturer’s CAD (computer-aided design) model. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of Tac2Pose compared with three baseline methods for tactile pose estimation: directly regressing the object pose with a neural network, matching an observed contact to a set of possible contacts using a standard classification neural network, and direct pixel comparison of an observed contact with a set of possible contacts. Website: mcube.mit.edu/research/tac2pose.html

Existing robotic systems have a clear tension between generality and precision. Deployed solutions for robotic manipulation tend to fall into the paradigm of one robot solving a single task, lacking precise generalization, i.e., the ability to solve many tasks without compromising on precision. This paper explores solutions for precise and general pick-and-place. In precise pick-and-place, i.e. kitting, the robot transforms an unstructured arrangement of objects into an organized arrangement, which can facilitate further manipulation. We propose simPLE (simulation to Pick Localize and PLacE) as a solution to precise pick-and-place. simPLE learns to pick, regrasp and place objects precisely, given only the object CAD model and no prior experience. We develop three main components: task-aware grasping, visuotactile perception, and regrasp planning. Task-aware grasping computes affordances of grasps that are stable, observable, and favorable to placing. The visuotactile perception model relies on matching real observations against a set of simulated ones through supervised learning. Finally, we compute the desired robot motion by solving a shortest path problem on a graph of hand-to-hand regrasps. On a dual-arm robot equipped with visuotactile sensing, we demonstrate pick-and-place of 15 diverse objects with simPLE. The objects span a wide range of shapes and simPLE achieves successful placements into structured arrangements with 1mm clearance over 90% of the time for 6 objects, and over 80% of the time for 11 objects. Videos are available at http://mcube.mit.edu/research/simPLE.html .

We propose a method that simultaneously estimates and controls extrinsic contact with tactile feedback. The method enables challenging manipulation tasks that require controlling light forces and accurate motions in contact, such as balancing an unknown object on a thin rod standing upright. A factor graph-based framework fuses a sequence of tactile and kinematic measurements to estimate and control the interaction between gripper-object-environment, including the location and wrench at the extrinsic contact between the grasped object and the environment and the grasp wrench transferred from the gripper to the object. The same framework simultaneously plans the gripper motions that make it possible to estimate the state while satisfying regularizing control objectives to prevent slip, such as minimizing the grasp wrench and minimizing frictional force at the extrinsic contact. We show results with sub-millimeter contact localization error and good slip prevention even on slippery environments, for multiple contact formations (point, line, patch contact) and transitions between them. See supplementary video and results at https://sites.google.com/view/sim-tact.

This work presents a novel hybrid rigid-soft continuum manipulator, which integrates high-resolution tactile sensing in a form factor that is forceful, compliant, inherently safe, and easily controllable. We utilize a hybrid approach motivated by scale-invariant principles to fuse the rigid and soft design domains while addressing their respective challenges. We use Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and geometric inference to design and develop a novel variant of folded flexure hinge (FFH) compliant mechanism, the variable area moment of inertia folded flexure hinge (VAFFH), which deforms logarithmically along its length and thus yields first-order scale-invariant grasp behavior. Finally, we characterize the forcefulness of the manipulator and demonstrate its compliance, adaptability, and tactile sensing capabilities in selected tasks.

This paper studies the robustness of grasping in the frictionless plane from a geometric perspective. By treating grasping as a process that shapes the free-space object over time, we define three types of certificates to guarantee success of a grasp: (a) invariance under an initial set, (b) convergence toward a goal grasp, and (c) observability over the final object pose. We develop convex-combinatorial models for each of these certificates, which can be expressed as simple semi-algebraic relations under mild-modeling assumptions, such as point-fingers and frictionless contact. By leveraging these models to synthesize certificates, we optimize certifiable grasps of planar objects composed as a union of convex polygons, using manipulators described as point-fingers. We validate this approach in simulations by grasping random polygons, and with real sensorless grasps of several objects.