Autonomous manipulation systems that can manipulate objects at high speeds are still scarce and limited. This project will investigate autonomous systems that can move around highly diverse objects in densely occupied spaces at high speed. A main challenge is to enable robots to work with different types of objects like rigid, articulated (e.g. books), separable (e.g. boxes), and deformable (including bagged), and interact with them with care so as to not damage them. For scalability, the robotic system should be able to improve continuously with experience, and generalize to previously unseen objects, materials, shapes and motions. This work is a new collaboration effort between the MIT groups of Russ Tedrake, Phillip Isola, and Alberto Rodriguez, as well as researchers at Amazon.
