Abstract:  Soft robot hands offer compelling advantages for manipulation tasks, including inherent safety through material compliance, robust adaptation to uncertain object geometries, and the ability to conform to complex shapes passively. However, these same properties create significant challenges for conventional sensing and control approaches. This talk presents approaches to bridging advances in geometric learning and [...]

Abstract: Robots operating in safety-critical environments must reason under uncertainty and adapt to novel situations. However, recent advances in data-driven perception have made it increasingly difficult to provide formal safety guarantees, particularly when systems encounter out-of-distribution or previously unseen inputs. For such systems to be safely deployed in the real world, we need data augmentation [...]