Spring 2022 GRASP SFI: Shuran Song, Columbia University, “The Reasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Manipulation for Deformable Objects”

*This was a HYBRID Event with in-person attendance in Levine 512 and Virtual attendance…

ABSTRACT

From unfurling a blanket to swinging a rope; high-velocity dynamic actions play a crucial role in how people interact with deformable objects. In this talk, I will discuss how we can get robots to learn to dynamically manipulate deformable objects, where we embrace high-velocity dynamics rather than avoid them (e.g., exclusively using slow pick and place actions). With robots that can fling, swing, or blow with air, our experiments show that these interactions are surprisingly effective for many classically hard manipulation problems and enable new robot capabilities.