Iterative Surface Mapping Using Local Geometry Approximation with Sparse Measurements During Robotic Tooling Tasks
Kiel University（基尔大学）
Manuel Amersdorfer, Thomas Meurer
备注：
Accepted for presentation at and publication in the proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 7 pages, 6 figures
We present a cost-efficient and versatile method to map an unknown 3D freeform surface using only sparse measurements while the end-effector of a robotic manipulator moves along the surface. The geometry is locally approximated by a plane, which is defined by measured points on the surface. The method relies on linear Kalman filters, estimating the height of each point on a 2D grid. Therefore, the approximation covariance for each grid point is determined using a radial basis function to consider the measured point positions. We propose different update strategies for the grid points exploiting the locality of the planar approximation in combination with a projection method. The approach is experimentally validated by tracking the surface with a robotic manipulator. Three laser distance sensors mounted on the end-effector continuously measure points on the surface during the motion to determine the approximation plane. It is shown that the surface geometry can be mapped reasonably accurate with a mean absolute error below 1 mm. The mapping error mainly depends on the size of the approximation area and the curvature of the surface.
The design and fabrication of soft robot hands is still a time-consuming and difficult process. Advances in rapid prototyping have accelerated the fabrication process significantly while introducing new complexities into the design process. In this work, we present an approach that utilizes novel low-cost fabrication techniques in conjunction with design tools helping soft hand designers to systematically take advantage of multi-material 3D printing to create dexterous soft robotic hands. While very low cost and lightweight, we show that generated designs are highly durable, surprisingly stron…
VIP: Variation-based Iterative-learning Planning for Robotic Navigation
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）；Tianmushan Laboratory, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学天目山实验室）
Accurate object rearrangement from vision is a crucial problem for a wide variety of real-world robotics applications in unstructured environments. We propose IFOR, Iterative Flow Minimization for Robotic Object Rearrangement, an end-to-end method for the challenging problem of object rearrangement for unknown objects given an RGBD image of the original and final scenes. First, we learn an optical flow model based on RAFT to estimate the relative transformation of the objects purely from synthetic data. This flow is then used in an iterative minimization algorithm to achieve accurate positioni…
ARP: Enhancing Quantized Skill Abstractions via Visual Alignment and Iterative Refinement for Robotic Manipulation
School of Future Science and Engineering, Soochow University（苏州大学未来科学与工程学院）；Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence and Large Models in Provincial Universities, Soochow University（苏州大学省高校通用人工智能与大模型重点实验室）；College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China Jiliang University（中国计量大学机电工程学院）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；Leju Robotics（乐聚机器人）
When designing swarm-robotic systems, systematic comparison of algorithms from different domains is necessary to determine which is capable of scaling up to handle the target problem size and target operating conditions. We propose a set of quantitative metrics for scalability, flexibility, and emergence which are capable of addressing these needs during the system design process. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed metrics as a design tool by solving a large object gathering problem in temporally varying operating conditions using iterative hypothesis evaluation. We provide exper…
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院）；University of Madeira（马德拉大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic coaches promise the improved engagement of patients on rehabilitation exercises through social interaction. While previous work explored the potential of automatically monitoring exercises for AI and robotic coaches, the deployment of these systems remains a challenge. Previous work described the lack of involving stakeholders to design such functionalities as one of the major causes. In this paper, we present our efforts on eliciting the detailed design specifications on how AI and robotic coaches could interact with and guide patient's exercises in an…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
In this paper, we propose an iterative self-training framework for sim-to-real 6D object pose estimation to facilitate cost-effective robotic grasping. Given a bin-picking scenario, we establish a photo-realistic simulator to synthesize abundant virtual data, and use this to train an initial pose estimation network. This network then takes the role of a teacher model, which generates pose predictions for unlabeled real data. With these predictions, we further design a comprehensive adaptive selection scheme to distinguish reliable results, and leverage them as pseudo labels to update a student…
This paper presents a point cloud based robotic system for arc welding. Using hand gesture controls, the system scans partial point cloud views of workpiece and reconstructs them into a complete 3D model by a linear iterative closest point algorithm. Then, a bilateral filter is extended to denoise the workpiece model and preserve important geometrical information. To extract the welding seam from the model, a novel intensity-based algorithm is proposed that detects edge points and generates a smooth 6-DOF welding path. The methods are tested on multiple workpieces with different joint types an…
Robustness study of the bio-inspired musculoskeletal arm robot based on the data-driven iterative learning algorithm
School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China（上海交通大学机械工程学院）；School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China（北京科技大学机械工程学院）
In this paper, we present the implementation details of a Virtual Reality (VR)-based teleoperation interface for moving a robotic manipulator. We propose an iterative human-in-the-loop design where the user sets the next task-space waypoint for the robot's end effector and executes the action on the physical robot before setting the next waypoints. Information from the robot's surroundings is provided to the user in two forms: as a point cloud in 3D space and a video stream projected on a virtual wall. The feasibility of the selected end effector pose is communicated to the user by the color o…
University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense 'closest' to the full Bayesian posterior. Closeness is typically defined through the selection of an appropriate loss functional such as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. In this paper, we explore a new formulation of variational inference by exploiting the fact that (most) PDFs are members of a Bayesian Hilbert space under careful definitions of vector additi…
This paper presents a state and state-input constrained variant of the discrete-time iterative Linear Quadratic Regulator (iLQR) algorithm, with linear time-complexity in the number of time steps. The approach is based on a projection of the control input onto the nullspace of the linearized constraints. We derive a fully constraint-compliant feedforward-feedback control update rule, for which we can solve efficiently with Riccati-style difference equations. We assume that the relative degree of all constraints in the discrete-time system model is equal to one, which often holds for robotics p…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute（香港应用科技研究院）
In this paper, we present a new robotic system to perform defect inspection tasks over free-form specular surfaces. The autonomous procedure is achieved by a six-DOF manipulator, equipped with a line scan camera and a high-intensity lighting system. Our method first uses the object's CAD mesh model to implement a K-means unsupervised learning algorithm that segments the object's surface into areas with similar curvature. Then, the scanning path is computed by using an adaptive algorithm that adjusts the camera's ROI to observe regions with irregular shapes properly. A novel iterative closest p…
Duke University（杜克大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Duke University Medical Center（杜克大学医学中心）
Robotic automation has the potential to assist human surgeons in performing suturing tasks in microsurgery, and in order to do so a robot must be able to guide a needle with sub-millimeter precision through soft tissue. This paper presents a robotic suturing system that uses 3D optical coherence tomography (OCT) system for imaging feedback. Calibration of the robot-OCT and robot-needle transforms, wound detection, keypoint identification, and path planning are all performed automatically. The calibration method handles pose uncertainty when the needle is grasped using a variant of iterative cl…
GeCo-SRT: Geometry-aware Continual Adaptation for Robotic Cross-Task Sim-to-Real Transfer
Beijing Forestry University（北京林业大学）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance（北京大型模型与智能治理研究重点实验室）；Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, MOE（下一代智能搜索与推荐工程研究中心，教育部）
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is to iron a piece of cloth autonomously. Given a roughly flattened cloth, the goal is to have an ironing plan that can iteratively apply a regular iron to remove all the major wrinkles by a robot. We present a novel solution to analyze the cloth surface by fusing two surface scan techniques: a curvature scan and a discontinuity scan. The curvature scan can estimate the height deviation of the cloth surface, while the discontinuity scan can effectively detect sharp surface features, such as wrinkles. We use th…
Putting the Iterative Training of Decision Trees to the Test on a Real-World Robotic Task
Cologne Institute of Computer Science（科隆计算机科学研究所）；TH Köln（科隆应用科学大学）；Institute of General Mechanical Engineering（通用机械工程研究所）；Institute for Neural Computation（神经计算研究所）；Ruhr-University Bochum（波鸿鲁尔大学）
Robotic Fabric Alignment System for Sewing Using Global Local Weighted ICP
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Tohoku University（东北大学）；Fukushima University（福岛大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Sensors producing 3D point clouds such as 3D laser scanners and RGB-D cameras are widely used in robotics, be it for autonomous driving or manipulation. Aligning point clouds produced by these sensors is a vital component in such applications to perform tasks such as model registration, pose estimation, and SLAM. Iterative closest point (ICP) is the most widely used method for this task, due to its simplicity and efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel method which solves the optimisation problem posed by ICP using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Using SGD allows us to improve the conv…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Humans coordinate the abundant degrees of freedom (DoFs) of hands to dexterously perform tasks in everyday life. We imitate human strategies to advance the dexterity of multi-DoF robotic hands. Specifically, we enable a robot hand to grasp multiple objects by exploiting its kinematic redundancy, referring to all its controllable DoFs. We propose a human-like grasp synthesis algorithm to generate grasps using pairwise contacts on arbitrary opposing hand surface regions, no longer limited to fingertips or hand inner surface. To model the available space of the hand for grasp, we construct a reac…
As robotic systems become more popular in household environments, the complexity of required tasks also increases. In this work we focus on a domestic chore deemed dull by a majority of the population, the task of ironing. The presented algorithm improves on the limited number of previous works by joining 3D perception with force/torque sensing, with emphasis on finding a practical solution with a feasible implementation in a domestic setting. Our algorithm obtains a point cloud representation of the working environment. From this point cloud, the garment is segmented and a custom Wrinkleness …
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；Air Force Institute of Technology（空军理工学院）
Recent advances in the fields of robotics and automation have spurred significant interest in robust state estimation. To enable robust state estimation, several methodologies have been proposed. One such technique, which has shown promising performance, is the concept of iteratively estimating a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), based upon the state estimation residuals, to characterize the measurement uncertainty model. Through this iterative process, the measurement uncertainty model is more accurately characterized, which enables robust state estimation through the appropriate de-weighting of …
Keypoint detection is an essential building block for many robotic applications like motion capture and pose estimation. Historically, keypoints are detected using uniquely engineered markers such as checkerboards or fiducials. More recently, deep learning methods have been explored as they have the ability to detect user-defined keypoints in a marker-less manner. However, different manually selected keypoints can have uneven performance when it comes to detection and localization. An example of this can be found on symmetric robotic tools where DNN detectors cannot solve the correspondence pr…
Quasi-Periodic Gaussian Process Predictive Iterative Learning Control
IITB-Monash Research Academy, IIT Bombay（IITB-蒙纳士研究学院，IIT博伊斯瓦尔）；Department of Mathematics, IIT Bombay（数学系，IIT博伊斯瓦尔）；Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University（电气与计算机系统工程系，蒙纳士大学）
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；TU Berlin（柏林工业大学）
Robotic manipulation of unknown objects is an important field of research. Practical applications occur in many real-world settings where robots need to interact with an unknown environment. We tackle the problem of reactive grasping by proposing a method for unknown object tracking, grasp point sampling and dynamic trajectory planning. Our object tracking method combines Siamese Networks with an Iterative Closest Point approach for pointcloud registration into a method for 6-DoF unknown object tracking. The method does not require further training and is robust to noise and occlusion. We prop…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；German Heart Center Munich（慕尼黑德国心脏中心）
Robotic ultrasound (US) imaging has been seen as a promising solution to overcome the limitations of free-hand US examinations, i.e., inter-operator variability. However, the fact that robotic US systems cannot react to subject movements during scans limits their clinical acceptance. Regarding human sonographers, they often react to patient movements by repositioning the probe or even restarting the acquisition, in particular for the scans of anatomies with long structures like limb arteries. To realize this characteristic, we proposed a vision-based system to monitor the subject's movement an…
Laboratoire des Sciences de l’Information et des Sytèmes（信息与系统科学实验室）
To ease the development of robot learning in industry, two conditions need to be fulfilled. Manipulators must be able to learn high accuracy and precision tasks while being safe for workers in the factory. In this paper, we extend previously submitted work which consists in rapid learning of local high accuracy behaviors. By exploration and regression, linear and quadratic models are learnt for respectively the dynamics and cost function. Iterative Linear Quadratic Gaussian Regulator combined with cost quadratic regression can converge rapidly in the final stages towards high accuracy behavior…
