A Perception-Manipulation Robotics System for Food Cutting

Robotic cutting is a challenging, contact-rich manipulation task where the robot must simultaneously negotiate unknown object mechanics, large contact forces, and precise motion requirements. Our hypothesis is that this complexity can be alleviated through the design of a physically structured virtual-model controller that uses switched virtual mechanisms to generate a robust, rhythmic rock-chop motion for robotic cutting, without requiring pre-planned trajectories or precise environmental information. Motion is generated by the interaction between the environment, the robot's dynamics, and the virtual forces of the switching virtual mechanism, ultimately realized through the available actuation. Through theoretical and numerical analysis, together with experimental validation, we demonstrate that the controlled robot behavior settles into a stable periodic motion. Experiments with a Franka manipulator demonstrate robust cuts across five different vegetables, achieving sub-millimeter slice accuracy for thicknesses from 1 mm to 7 mm at a rate of nearly one cut per second. The controller maintains high performance despite changes in knife shape or cutting board height, and successfully adapts to a different humanoid manipulator, demonstrating robustness and platform independence.

Deploying robots in everyday human environments requires perception systems that are both robust and adaptable to diverse, dynamic conditions. In this work, we present a modular perception pipeline for household manipulation tasks, with a focus on dishware handling in kitchen environments. The pipeline integrates open-vocabulary object detection, multi-view segmentation, instance-aware 3D reconstruction, and a 2D-3D feature fusion strategy for 6D pose estimation and grasp planning. Its modular design enables systematic substitution of multiple visual and geometric foundation models, allowing us to identify the best-performing configuration through extensive evaluation on a custom kitchen dataset. The best-performing configuration (LLMDet + SAMv2 + DINOv2 + GeoTransformer) achieves an ADI of 89.12% on the 20-scene kitchen benchmark with cluttered and occluded conditions. Furthermore, real-world demonstrations confirm that the best configuration can be deployed on physical robots without environment-specific retraining, successfully executing tasks such as sink-to-dishwasher transfer and cup stacking. It validates the adaptability and scalability of the pipeline and highlights its potential as a practical framework for household robotic systems. Our code and supplementary materials are available at https://raivlab.github.io/FM_kitchen .

Autonomous robotic craniotomy requires continuous regulation of tool-tissue interactions to mitigate mechanical overload and thermal damage while maintaining surgical efficiency. However, this process is inherently partially observable due to unknown, time-varying tissue properties and the inability to directly measure cutting temperatures under physical occlusion. To address these challenges, we propose RL-MACRO, a cybernetic closed-loop intelligence framework that couples multimodal perception, adaptive decision-making, and robotic execution. This framework empowers the surgical robot to autonomously perceive inaccessible states from partial sensory feedback and dynamically optimize its behaviors under uncertain environment. A CNN-LSTM observer first fuses force and sound feedback to reconstruct the hidden temperature state (R^2=0.939, MAE = 1.717 deg C). This reconstructed temperature, alongside multi-sensor features, forms the belief state for an offline Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) policy. A novel dual-head Actor dynamically coordinates the feed rate, spindle speed, and cutting depth to optimize efficiency within strict safety bounds. These decisions are seamlessly translated into spatial motions via online trajectory re-planning and velocity servoing. Experiments on bovine ribs and six ex vivo goat skulls validate the system's robust perception, adaptive recovery from force/temperature excursions, and smooth execution on irregular surfaces, establishing a data-driven cybernetic paradigm for safe and efficient autonomous bone cutting.