No Arabic abstract
A robot working in human-centric environments needs to know which kind of objects exist in the scene, where they are, and how to grasp and manipulate various objects in different situations to help humans in everyday tasks. Therefore, object recognition and grasping are two key functionalities for such robots. Most state-of-the-art tackles object recognition and grasping as two separate problems while both use visual input. Furthermore, the knowledge of the robot is fixed after the training phase. In such cases, if the robot faces new object categories, it must retrain from scratch to incorporate new information without catastrophic interference. To address this problem, we propose a deep learning architecture with augmented memory capacities to handle open-ended object recognition and grasping simultaneously. In particular, our approach takes multi-views of an object as input and jointly estimates pixel-wise grasp configuration as well as a deep scale- and rotation-invariant representation as outputs. The obtained representation is then used for open-ended object recognition through a meta-active learning technique. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to grasp never-seen-before objects and to rapidly learn new object categories using very few examples on-site in both simulation and real-world settings.
Despite the impressive progress achieved in robust grasp detection, robots are not skilled in sophisticated grasping tasks (e.g. search and grasp a specific object in clutter). Such tasks involve not only grasping, but comprehensive perception of the visual world (e.g. the relationship between objects). Recently, the advanced deep learning techniques provide a promising way for understanding the high-level visual concepts. It encourages robotic researchers to explore solutions for such hard and complicated fields. However, deep learning usually means data-hungry. The lack of data severely limits the performance of deep-learning-based algorithms. In this paper, we present a new dataset named regrad to sustain the modeling of relationships among objects and grasps. We collect the annotations of object poses, segmentations, grasps, and relationships in each image for comprehensive perception of grasping. Our dataset is collected in both forms of 2D images and 3D point clouds. Moreover, since all the data are generated automatically, users are free to import their own object models for the generation of as many data as they want. We have released our dataset and codes. A video that demonstrates the process of data generation is also available.
We consider the problem of planning views for a robot to acquire images of an object for visual inspection and reconstruction. In contrast to offline methods which require a 3D model of the object as input or online methods which rely on only local measurements, our method uses a neural network which encodes shape information for a large number of objects. We build on recent deep learning methods capable of generating a complete 3D reconstruction of an object from a single image. Specifically, in this work, we extend a recent method which uses Higher Order Functions (HOF) to represent the shape of the object. We present a new generalization of this method to incorporate multiple images as input and establish a connection between visibility and reconstruction quality. This relationship forms the foundation of our view planning method where we compute viewpoints to visually cover the output of the multi-view HOF network with as few images as possible. Experiments indicate that our method provides a good compromise between online and offline methods: Similar to online methods, our method does not require the true object model as input. In terms of number of views, it is much more efficient. In most cases, its performance is comparable to the optimal offline case even on object classes the network has not been trained on.
Existing multi-camera SLAM systems assume synchronized shutters for all cameras, which is often not the case in practice. In this work, we propose a generalized multi-camera SLAM formulation which accounts for asynchronous sensor observations. Our framework integrates a continuous-time motion model to relate information across asynchronous multi-frames during tracking, local mapping, and loop closing. For evaluation, we collected AMV-Bench, a challenging new SLAM dataset covering 482 km of driving recorded using our asynchronous multi-camera robotic platform. AMV-Bench is over an order of magnitude larger than previous multi-view HD outdoor SLAM datasets, and covers diverse and challenging motions and environments. Our experiments emphasize the necessity of asynchronous sensor modeling, and show that the use of multiple cameras is critical towards robust and accurate SLAM in challenging outdoor scenes. For additional information, please see the project website at: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ajyang/amv-slam
Robotic exploration under uncertain environments is challenging when optical information is not available. In this paper, we propose an autonomous solution of exploring an unknown task space based on tactile sensing alone. We first designed a whisker sensor based on MEMS barometer devices. This sensor can acquire contact information by interacting with the environment non-intrusively. This sensor is accompanied by a planning technique to generate exploration trajectories by using mere tactile perception. This technique relies on a hybrid policy for tactile exploration, which includes a proactive informative path planner for object searching, and a reactive Hopf oscillator for contour tracing. Results indicate that the hybrid exploration policy can increase the efficiency of object discovery. Last, scene understanding was facilitated by segmenting objects and classification. A classifier was developed to recognize the object categories based on the geometric features collected by the whisker sensor. Such an approach demonstrates the whisker sensor, together with the tactile intelligence, can provide sufficiently discriminative features to distinguish objects.
Autonomous robotic grasping plays an important role in intelligent robotics. However, how to help the robot grasp specific objects in object stacking scenes is still an open problem, because there are two main challenges for autonomous robots: (1)it is a comprehensive task to know what and how to grasp; (2)it is hard to deal with the situations in which the target is hidden or covered by other objects. In this paper, we propose a multi-task convolutional neural network for autonomous robotic grasping, which can help the robot find the target, make the plan for grasping and finally grasp the target step by step in object stacking scenes. We integrate vision-based robotic grasping detection and visual manipulation relationship reasoning in one single deep network and build the autonomous robotic grasping system. Experimental results demonstrate that with our model, Baxter robot can autonomously grasp the target with a success rate of 90.6%, 71.9% and 59.4% in object cluttered scenes, familiar stacking scenes and complex stacking scenes respectively.