No Arabic abstract
In this work, we present a geometry-based grasping algorithm that is capable of efficiently generating both top and side grasps for unknown objects, using a single view RGB-D camera, and of selecting the most promising one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a picking scenario on a real robot platform. Our approach has shown to be more reliable than another recent geometry-based method considered as baseline [7] in terms of grasp stability, by increasing the successful grasp attempts by a factor of six.
Planning high-speed trajectories for UAVs in unknown environments requires algorithmic techniques that enable fast reaction times to guarantee safety as more information about the environment becomes available. The standard approaches that ensure safety by enforcing a stop condition in the free-known space can severely limit the speed of the vehicle, especially in situations where much of the world is unknown. Moreover, the ad-hoc time and interval allocation scheme usually imposed on the trajectory also leads to conservative and slower trajectories. This work proposes FASTER (Fast and Safe Trajectory Planner) to ensure safety without sacrificing speed. FASTER obtains high-speed trajectories by enabling the local planner to optimize in both the free-known and unknown spaces. Safety is ensured by always having a safe back-up trajectory in the free-known space. The MIQP formulation proposed also allows the solver to choose the trajectory interval allocation. FASTER is tested extensively in simulation and in real hardware, showing flights in unknown cluttered environments with velocities up to 7.8m/s, and experiments at the maximum speed of a skid-steer ground robot (2m/s).
In this paper, we propose a robust and efficient quadrotor motion planning system for fast flight in 3-D complex environments. We adopt a kinodynamic path searching method to find a safe, kinodynamic feasible and minimum-time initial trajectory in the discretized control space. We improve the smoothness and clearance of the trajectory by a B-spline optimization, which incorporates gradient information from a Euclidean distance field (EDF) and dynamic constraints efficiently utilizing the convex hull property of B-spline. Finally, by representing the final trajectory as a non-uniform B-spline, an iterative time adjustment method is adopted to guarantee dynamically feasible and non-conservative trajectories. We validate our proposed method in various complex simulational environments. The competence of the method is also validated in challenging real-world tasks. We release our code as an open-source package.
This paper introduces a new technique for learning probabilistic models of mass and friction distributions of unknown objects, and performing robust sliding actions by using the learned models. The proposed method is executed in two consecutive phases. In the exploration phase, a table-top object is poked by a robot from different angles. The observed motions of the object are compared against simulated motions with various hypothesized mass and friction models. The simulation-to-reality gap is then differentiated with respect to the unknown mass and friction parameters, and the analytically computed gradient is used to optimize those parameters. Since it is difficult to disentangle the mass from the friction coefficients in low-data and quasi-static motion regimes, our approach retains a set of locally optimal pairs of mass and friction models. A probability distribution on the models is computed based on the relative accuracy of each pair of models. In the exploitation phase, a probabilistic planner is used to select a goal configuration and waypoints that are stable with a high confidence. The proposed technique is evaluated on real objects and using a real manipulator. The results show that this technique can not only identify accurately mass and friction coefficients of non-uniform heterogeneous objects, but can also be used to successfully slide an unknown object to the edge of a table and pick it up from there, without any human assistance or feedback.
We present a generalized grasping algorithm that uses point clouds (i.e. a group of points and their respective surface normals) to discover grasp pose solutions for multiple grasp types, executed by a mechanical gripper, in near real-time. The algorithm introduces two ideas: 1) a histogram of finger contact normals is used to represent a grasp shape to guide a gripper orientation search in a histogram of object(s) surface normals, and 2) voxel grid representations of gripper and object(s) are cross-correlated to match finger contact points, i.e. grasp size, to discover a grasp pose. Constraints, such as collisions with neighbouring objects, are optionally incorporated in the cross-correlation computation. We show via simulations and experiments that 1) grasp poses for three grasp types can be found in near real-time, 2) grasp pose solutions are consistent with respect to voxel resolution changes for both partial and complete point cloud scans, and 3) a planned grasp is executed with a mechanical gripper.
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate placement in a tight region, depend more critically on shape information to achieve safe execution. This work deals with pick-and-constrained placement of objects without access to geometric models. The objective is to pick an object and place it safely inside a desired goal region without any collisions, while minimizing the time and the sensing operations required to complete the task. An algorithmic framework is proposed for this purpose, which performs manipulation planning simultaneously over a conservative and an optimistic estimate of the objects volume. The conservative estimate ensures that the manipulation is safe while the optimistic estimate guides the sensor-based manipulation process when no solution can be found for the conservative estimate. To maintain these estimates and dynamically update them during manipulation, objects are represented by a simple volumetric representation, which stores sets of occupied and unseen voxels. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by developing a robotic system that picks a previously unseen object from a table-top and places it in a constrained space. The system comprises of a dual-arm manipulator with heterogeneous end-effectors and leverages hand-offs as a re-grasping strategy. Real-world experiments show that straightforward pick-sense-and-place alternatives frequently fail to solve pick-and-constrained placement problems. The proposed pipeline, however, achieves more than 95% success rate and faster execution times as evaluated over multiple physical experiments.