This abstract summarizes recent research on the autonomous acquisition of transferrable manipulation skills. We describe a robot system that learns to sequence a set of innate controllers to solve a task, and then extracts transferrable manipulation skills from the resulting solution. Using the extracted skills, the robot is able to significantly reduce the time required to discover the solutio...

Manipulation problems involving many objects present substantial challenges for planning algorithms due to the high dimensionality and multi-modality of the search space. Symbolic task planners can efficiently construct plans involving many entities but cannot incorporate the constraints from geometry and kinematics. Existing approaches to integrated task and motion planning as well as manipula...

PURPOSE To evaluate the effect of perspective distortion of wide-angle lenses in laparoscopes on hand-eye coordination during endoscopic manipulation. METHODS Sixteen subjects repeatedly performed a standardized positioning task in a pelvi-trainer under two conditions. The subjects had no prior experience with endoscopic manipulation. In one condition, a wide-angle lens with considerable pers...

The applications of manipulation tasks will soon move from caged robots in assembly lines to the more challenging household and collaborative ones that have to operate in dynamic and unpredictable environments. Due to the uncertainty of such environments, it is preferable to perform tasks in a reactive and robust fashion. Classic task execution architectures fail to do so in reasonable complexi...

An essential problem of imitation is that of determining ”what to imitate”, i.e. to determine which of the many features of the demonstration are relevant to the task and which should be reproduced. The strategy followed by the imitator can be modeled as a hierarchical optimization system, which minimizes the discrepancy between two multidimensional datasets. We consider imitation of a manipula...

The global neuronal workspace theory [Dehaene, S., & Naccache, L. (2001). Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79, 1-37.] proposes that it is impossible for an unconscious stimulus to be used strategically to enhance task performance (bottom-up effect), while a fully consciously perceived stimulus can be used to improve task per...

Data exploration and manipulation are traditionally considered independently. In this work, we argue to integrate exploration and manipulation in order to smooth user workflows. Our focus is on changing the visual encoding of graph attributes as an exploration task and on changing attribute values as a manipulation task. We present a novel approach for integrating both tasks via a unified visua...

The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the manoeuvring of a non-holonomic vehicle and the motion of a supported manipulation system (composed by one or two arms) when the overall system is commanded to execute a given grasping or manipulation task. The objective being clearly that of suitably exploiting the extra dof’s offered by the vehicle for better accomplishing the assig...