Jinjun Duan

Yi Dong, Yang Li, Jinjun Duan et al.

Robotic manipulation of flexible objects is widely required in both industrial and service applications. Among such objects, paper-like materials exhibit distinct mechanical characteristics compared to cloth, being more sensitive to compressive stress, where minor variations in physical properties can significantly affect grasping. This study systematically investigates grasping strategies for paper-like materials using a universal soft gripper by exploiting environmental constraints. Based on manipulation primitives employed in existing grasping strategies, we proposed systematic grasping strategies for flexible materials by exploiting environmental constraints and analyzed their mechanical and kinematic models. To investigate the influence of materials and working conditions on grasping, an evaluation system for measuring grasping force and success rate was defined and experimentally evaluated. Finally, we summarized the specific workspaces and characteristics of different strategies that can satisfy various task requirements and lead to potential applications in household service robots for grasping planar flexible objects.

Yi Dong. Yangjun Liu, Jinjun Duan, Yang Li et al.

Desktop organization remains challenging for service robots because of heterogeneous objects and diverse manipulation objectives, such as collection and stacking. In this article, a task-oriented framework is presented for organizing planar rigid and deformable objects on desks. A perception pipeline was developed that augments existing datasets with uncommon desktop items and makes geometry-based pose and keypoint estimation possible, along with the detection of environmental constraints, such as table edges. To handle diverse manipulation requirements, environment-assisted primitives are used, including contact-based grasping for small objects, edge-based push-grasping for planar rigid objects, and levering-based grasping for planar deformable objects. These primitives leverage environmental and interobject constraints to improve robustness. A task planner was designed to integrate these primitives into multiobject organization. Sufficient real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. This research provides practical manipulation primitives for planar rigid and deformable objects, highlighting the role of environmental and interobject constraints in complex multiobject manipulation tasks. Code and video are available online.