No Arabic abstract
We present an approach for safe and object-independent human-to-robot handovers using real time robotic vision and manipulation. We aim for general applicability with a generic object detector, a fast grasp selection algorithm and by using a single gripper-mounted RGB-D camera, hence not relying on external sensors. The robot is controlled via visual servoing towards the object of interest. Putting a high emphasis on safety, we use two perception modules: human body part segmentation and hand/finger segmentation. Pixels that are deemed to belong to the human are filtered out from candidate grasp poses, hence ensuring that the robot safely picks the object without colliding with the human partner. The grasp selection and perception modules run concurrently in real-time, which allows monitoring of the progress. In experiments with 13 objects, the robot was able to successfully take the object from the human in 81.9% of the trials.
Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape, and rigidity. In this paper, we present a vision-based system that enables reactive human-to-robot handovers of unknown objects. Our approach combines closed-loop motion planning with real-time, temporally-consistent grasp generation to ensure reactivity and motion smoothness. Our system is robust to different object positions and orientations, and can grasp both rigid and non-rigid objects. We demonstrate the generalizability, usability, and robustness of our approach on a novel benchmark set of 26 diverse household objects, a user study with naive users (N=6) handing over a subset of 15 objects, and a systematic evaluation examining different ways of handing objects. More results and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/nvidia.com/handovers-of-arbitrary-objects.
Researchers and robotic development groups have recently started paying special attention to autonomous mobile robot navigation in indoor environments using vision sensors. The required data is provided for robot navigation and object detection using a camera as a sensor. The aim of the project is to construct a mobile robot that has integrated vision system capability used by a webcam to locate, track and follow a moving object. To achieve this task, multiple image processing algorithms are implemented and processed in real-time. A mini-laptop was used for collecting the necessary data to be sent to a PIC microcontroller that turns the processes of data obtained to provide the robots proper orientation. A vision system can be utilized in object recognition for robot control applications. The results demonstrate that the proposed mobile robot can be successfully operated through a webcam that detects the object and distinguishes a tennis ball based on its color and shape.
Humans are highly skilled in communicating their intent for when and where a handover would occur. However, even the state-of-the-art robotic implementations for handovers display a general lack of communication skills. This study aims to visualize the internal state and intent of robots for Human-to-Robot Handovers using Augmented Reality. Specifically, we aim to visualize 3D models of the object and the robotic gripper to communicate the robots estimation of where the object is and the pose in which the robot intends to grasp the object. We tested this design via a user study with 16 participants, in which each participant handed over a cube-shaped object to the robot 12 times. Results show that visualizing robot intent using augmented reality substantially improves the subjective experience of the users for handovers. Results also indicate that the effectiveness of augmented reality is even more pronounced for the perceived safety and fluency of the interaction when the robot makes errors in localizing the object.
We propose a vision-based architecture search algorithm for robot manipulation learning, which discovers interactions between low dimension action inputs and high dimensional visual inputs. Our approach automatically designs architectures while training on the task - discovering novel ways of combining and attending image feature representations with actions as well as features from previous layers. The obtained new architectures demonstrate better task success rates, in some cases with a large margin, compared to a recent high performing baseline. Our real robot experiments also confirm that it improves grasping performance by 6%. This is the first approach to demonstrate a successful neural architecture search and attention connectivity search for a real-robot task.
Humans in contrast to robots are excellent in performing fine manipulation tasks owing to their remarkable dexterity and sensorimotor organization. Enabling robots to acquire such capabilities, necessitates a framework that not only replicates the human behaviour but also integrates the multi-sensory information for autonomous object interaction. To address such limitations, this research proposes to augment the previously developed kernelized synergies framework with visual perception to automatically adapt to the unknown objects. The kernelized synergies, inspired from humans, retain the same reduced subspace for object grasping and manipulation. To detect object in the scene, a simplified perception pipeline is used that leverages the RANSAC algorithm with Euclidean clustering and SVM for object segmentation and recognition respectively. Further, the comparative analysis of kernelized synergies with other state of art approaches is made to confirm their flexibility and effectiveness on the robotic manipulation tasks. The experiments conducted on the robot hand confirm the robustness of modified kernelized synergies framework against the uncertainties related to the perception of environment.