Bimanual Manipulation of Rigid and Deformable Objects

Tasks that humans find simple and trivial are complex and difficult for a robot to perform. When interacting with objects, the robot needs a greater understanding of the geometrical, topological and physical properties of these objects. This can be done either by modelling and representing these properties or by learning them from data. The main goal of the EU-funded BIRD project is to create new informative and compact representations of deformable objects that incorporate both analytical and learning-based approaches. The new representations should also encode geometric, topological and physical information about the robot, the object and the environment. The project's results are expected to reveal more about sensorimotor behaviour in bimanual robot systems.