February 13, 2024
Professors Daniel Rakita and Brian Scassellati were awarded a grant for their proposal “Robot Manipulation in Densely Cluttered Environments”. This work will focus on creating a generalizable framework that enables robots to work in cluttered environments, such as for homecare, healthcare, agriculture, or disaster relief scenarios. Areas of investigation will include dynamically adjusting viewpoints to locate occluded objects, computing long action sequences to clear obstacles, and crafting motion strategies that make strategic contacts with surrounding items to gain better access to parts of the workspace. The $1.2M grant is funded by the Office of Naval Research.