Robotic assembly is a longstanding challenge, requiring contact-rich interaction and high precision and accuracy. Many applications also require adaptivity to diverse parts, poses, and environments, as well as low cycle times. In other areas of robotics, simulation is a powerful tool to develop algorithms, generate datasets, and train agents. However, simulation has had a more limited impact on assembly.

Many defenses against adversarial attacks (\eg robust classifiers, randomization, or image purification) use countermeasures put to work only after the attack has been crafted. We adopt a different perspective to introduce A5 (Adversarial Augmentation Against Adversarial Attacks), a novel framework including the first certified preemptive defense against adversarial attacks. The main idea is to craft a defensive perturbation to guarantee that any attack (up to a given magnitude) towards the input in hand will fail.

Artist generated clip-art images typically consist of a small number of distinct, uniformly colored regions with clear boundaries. Legacy artist created images are often stored in low-resolution (100x100px or less) anti-aliased raster form. Compared to anti-aliasing free rasterization, anti-aliasing blurs inter-region boundaries and obscures the artist's intended region topology and color palette; at the same time, it better preserves subpixel details.

2D texture maps and 3D voxel arrays are widely used to add rich detail to the surfaces and volumes of rendered scenes, and filtered texture lookups are integral to producing high-quality imagery. We show that applying the texture filter after evaluating shading generally gives more accurate imagery than filtering textures before BSDF evaluation, as is current practice. These benefits are not merely theoretical, but are apparent in common cases. We demonstrate that practical and efficient filtering after shading is possible through the use of stochastic sampling of texture filters.

This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness on massively parallel GPUs. We show that combining simple optimization techniques with many parallel seeds leads to solving difficult motion generation problems within 53ms on average, 62x faster than SOTA trajectory optimization methods.

Robots operating in human environments must be able to rearrange objects into semantically-meaningful configurations, even if these objects are previously unseen. We focus on the problem of building physically-valid structures without step-by-step instructions.

We propose StructDiffusion, which combines a diffusion model and an object-centric transformer to construct structures given partial-view point clouds and high-level language goals, such as "set the table" and "make a line".

Task planning can require defining myriad domain knowledge about the world in which a robot needs to act. To ameliorate that effort, large language models (LLMs) can be used to score potential next actions during task planning, and even generate action sequences directly, given an instruction in natural language with no additional domain information. However, such methods either require enumerating all possible next steps for scoring, or generate free-form text that may contain actions not possible on a given robot in its current context.

We propose the first framework to learn control policies for vision-based human-to-robot handovers, a critical task for human-robot interaction. While research in Embodied AI has made significant progress in training robot agents in simulated environments, interacting with humans remains challenging due to the difficulties of simulating humans. Fortunately, recent research has developed realistic simulated environments for human-to-robot handovers.