Manipulating Highly Deformable Materials Using a Visual Feedback Dictionary

The complex physical properties of highly deformable materials such as clothes pose significant challenges fanipulation systems. We present a novel visual feedback dictionary-based method for manipulating defoor autonomous robotic mrmable objects towards a desired configuration. Our approach is based on visual servoing and we use an efficient technique to extract key features from the RGB sensor stream in the form of a histogram of deformable model features. These histogram features serve as high-level representations of the state of the deformable material. Next, we collect manipulation data and use a visual feedback dictionary that maps the velocity in the high-dimensional feature space to the velocity of the robotic end-effectors for manipulation. We have evaluated our approach on a set of complex manipulation tasks and human-robot manipulation tasks on different cloth pieces with varying material characteristics.Comment: The video is available at goo.gl/mDSC4

Dynamical critical quantum sensing with a single parametrically-driven nonlinear resonator

Critical phenomena of quantum systems are useful for enhancement of quantum sensing. We here investigate the performance of a sensing scheme, where the signal is encoded in the dynamically-evolving state of an oscillator, featuring a competition of the Kerr nonlinearity and parametric driving. We calculate the quantum Fisher information, and perform a simulation, which confirms the criticality-enabled enhancement. We further detail the response of one of the quadratures to the variation of the control parameter. The numerical results reveal that its inverted variance exhibits a diverging behavior at the critical point.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure