Programming robots for general purpose applications is extremely challenging due to the great diversity of end-user tasks ranging from manufacturing environments to personal homes. Recent work has focused on enabling end-users to program robots using Programming by Demonstration. However, teaching robots new actions from scratch that can be reused for unseen tasks remains a difficult challenge and is generally left up to robotic experts. We propose iRoPro, an interactive Robot Programming framework that allows end-users to teach robots new actions from scratch and reuse them with a task planner. In this work we provide a system implementation on a two-armed Baxter robot that (i) allows simultaneous teaching of low- and high-level actions by demonstration, (ii) includes a user interface for action creation with condition inference and modification, and (iii) allows creating and solving previously unseen problems using a task planner for the robot to execute in real-time. We evaluate the generalisation power of the system on six benchmark tasks and show how taught actions can be easily reused for complex tasks. We further demonstrate its usability with a user study (N=21), where users completed eight tasks to teach the robot new actions that are reused with a task planner. The study demonstrates that users with any programming level and educational background can easily learn and use the system.
Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani（皮拉尼伯拉理工学院（BITS皮拉尼））；University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学雷诺分校）
This paper presents the design concept, modeling and motion planning solution for the aerial robotic chain. This design represents a configurable robotic system of systems, consisting of multi-linked micro aerial vehicles that simultaneously presents the ability to cross narrow sections, morph its shape, ferry significant payloads, offer the potential of distributed sensing and processing, and allow system extendability. We contribute an approach to address the motion planning problem of such a connected robotic system of systems, making full use of its reconfigurable nature, to find collision…
In this paper, we report on our use of cloud-robotics solutions to teach a Robotics Applications Programming course at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). The usage of Kubernetes based cloud computing environment combined with real robots -- turtlebots and Niryo arms -- allowed us to: 1) minimize the set up times required to provide a Robotic Operating System (ROS) simulation and development environment to all students independently of their laptop architecture and OS; 2) provide a seamless "simulation to real" experience preserving the exciting experience of writing software interac…
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…
While robotic spatial extrusion has demonstrated a new and efficient means to fabricate 3D truss structures in architectural scale, a major challenge remains in automatically planning extrusion sequence and robotic motion for trusses with unconstrained topologies. This paper presents the first attempt in the field to rigorously formulate the extrusion sequence and motion planning (SAMP) problem, using a CSP encoding. Furthermore, this research proposes a new hierarchical planning framework to solve the extrusion SAMP problems that usually have a long planning horizon and 3D configuration compl…
Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校机器人研究中心）；TCS Research（塔塔咨询服务公司研究部）
Table-top Rearrangement and Planning is a challenging problem that relies heavily on an excellent perception stack. The perception stack involves observing and registering the 3D scene on the table, detecting what objects are on the table, and how to manipulate them. Consequently, it greatly influences the system's task-planning and motion-planning stacks that follow. We present a comprehensive overview and discuss the different challenges associated with the perception module. This work is a result of our extensive involvement in the ICRA 2022 Open Cloud Robot Table Organization Challenge, in…
In this paper, we explore the task of robot sculpting. We propose a search based planning algorithm to solve the problem of sculpting by material removal with a multi-axis manipulator. We generate collision free trajectories for a manipulator using best-first search in voxel space. We also show significant speedup of our algorithm by using octrees to decompose the voxel space. We demonstrate our algorithm on a multi-axis manipulator in simulation by sculpting Michelangelo's Statue of David, evaluate certain metrics of our algorithm and discuss future goals for the project.
CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）；University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）
Autonomous navigation systems based on computer vision sensors often require sophisticated robotics platforms which are very expensive. This poses a barrier for the implementation and testing of complex localization, mapping, and navigation algorithms that are vital in robotics applications. Addressing this issue, in this work, Robot Operating System (ROS) supported mobile robotics platforms are compared and an end-to-end implementation of an autonomous navigation system based on a low-cost educational robotics platform, AlphaBot2 is presented, while integrating the Intel RealSense D435 camera…
We present an attention based visual analysis framework to compute grasp-relevant information in order to guide grasp planning using a multi-fingered robotic hand. Our approach uses a computational visual attention model to locate regions of interest in a scene, and uses a deep convolutional neural network to detect grasp type and point for a sub-region of the object presented in a region of interest. We demonstrate the proposed framework in object grasping tasks, in which the information generated from the proposed framework is used as prior information to guide the grasp planning. Results sh…
In this paper, we propose a new action planning approach to automatically pack long linear elastic objects into common-size boxes with a bimanual robotic system. For that, we developed a hybrid geometric model to handle large-scale occlusions combining an online vision-based method and an offline reference template. Then, a reference point generator is introduced to automatically plan the reference poses for the predesigned action primitives. Finally, an action planner integrates these components enabling the execution of high-level behaviors and the accomplishment of packing manipulation task…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院哈拉格普尔分校）
Sampling based methods are widely used for robotic motion planning. Traditionally, these samples are drawn from probabilistic ( or deterministic ) distributions to cover the state space uniformly. Despite being probabilistically complete, they fail to find a feasible path in a reasonable amount of time in constrained environments where it is essential to go through narrow passages (bottleneck regions). Current state of the art techniques train a learning model (learner) to predict samples selectively on these bottleneck regions. However, these algorithms depend completely on samples generated …
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）
Many applications from the robotics domain can benefit from FPGA acceleration. A corresponding key question is how to integrate hardware accelerators into software-centric robotics programming environments. Recently, several approaches have demonstrated hardware acceleration for the robot operating system (ROS), the dominant programming environment in robotics. ROS is a middleware layer that features the composition of complex robotics applications as a set of nodes that communicate via mechanisms such as publish/subscribe, and distributes them over several compute platforms. In this paper, we…
How does one obtain an admissible heuristic for a kinodynamic motion planning problem? This paper develops the analytical tools and techniques to answer this question. A sufficient condition for the admissibility of a heuristic is presented which can be checked directly from the problem data. This condition is also used to formulate a concave program to optimize an admissible heuristic. This optimization is then approximated and solved in polynomial time using sum-of-squares programming techniques. A number of examples are provided to demonstrate these concepts.
IntelliMove: Enhancing Robotic Planning with Semantic Mapping
S.A.S. euroDAO（S.A.S. 欧元道）；LIRMM（蒙彼利埃计算机科学、机器人学、微电子与微电子实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；Université de Picardie Jules Verne（儒勒·凡尔纳皮卡第大学）
Assessing the Value of Visual Input: A Benchmark of Multimodal Large Language Models for Robotic Path Planning
Department of Micro-Nano Mechanical Science and Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan（Nagoya大学微纳米机械科学与工程系）；Institutes of Innovation for Future Society, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi, Japan（Nagoya大学未来社会创新研究所）
We propose a two-phase risk-averse architecture for controlling stochastic nonlinear robotic systems. We present Risk-Averse Nonlinear Steering RRT* (RANS-RRT*) as an RRT* variant that incorporates nonlinear dynamics by solving a nonlinear program (NLP) and accounts for risk by approximating the state distribution and performing a distributionally robust (DR) collision check to promote safe planning. The generated plan is used as a reference for a low-level tracking controller. We demonstrate three controllers: finite horizon linear quadratic regulator (LQR) with linearized dynamics around the…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；the University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
Path planning is a fundamental capability for autonomous navigation of robotic wheelchairs. With the impressive development of deep-learning technologies, imitation learning-based path planning approaches have achieved effective results in recent years. However, the disadvantages of these approaches are twofold: 1) they may need extensive time and labor to record expert demonstrations as training data; and 2) existing approaches could only receive high-level commands, such as turning left/right. These commands could be less sufficient for the navigation of mobile robots (e.g., robotic wheelcha…
Osaka University（大阪大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
This paper develops a robotic manipulation planner for human-robot collaborative assembly. Unlike previous methods which study an independent and fully AI-equipped autonomous system, this paper explores the subtask distribution between a robot and a human and studies a human-in-the-loop robotic system for collaborative assembly. The system distributes the subtasks of an assembly to robots and humans by exploiting their advantages and avoiding their disadvantages. The robot in the system will work on pick-and-place tasks and provide workpieces to humans. The human collaborator will work on fine…
Aerial drones have great potential to monitor large areas quickly and efficiently. Aquaculture is an industry that requires continuous water quality data to successfully grow and harvest fish. The Hybrid Aerial Underwater Robotic System (HAUCS) is designed to collect water quality data of aquaculture ponds to reduce labor costs for farmers. The routing of drones to cover each fish pond on an aquaculture farm can be reduced to the Vehicle Routing Problem. A dataset is created to simulate the distribution of ponds on a farm and is used to assess the HAUCS Path Planning Algorithm (HPP). Its perfo…
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学电气工程学院）
In this paper, we report the results of our latest work on the automated generation of planning operators from human demonstrations, and we present some of our future research ideas. To automatically generate planning operators, our system segments and recognizes different observed actions from human demonstrations. We then proposed an automatic extraction method to detect the relevant preconditions and effects from these demonstrations. Finally, our system generates the associated planning operators and finds a sequence of actions that satisfies a user-defined goal using a symbolic planner. T…
This paper aims to implement Object-Oriented Markov Decision Process (OO-MDPs) for goal planning and navigation of robot in an indoor environment. We use the OO-MDP representation of the environment which is a natural way of modeling the environment based on objects and their interactions. The paper aims to extend the well known Taxi domain example which has been tested on grid world environment to robotics domain with larger state-spaces. For the purpose of this project we have created simulation of the environment and robot in ROS with Gazebo and Rviz as visualization tools.The mobile robot …
Providing explanations of chosen robotic actions can help to increase the transparency of robotic planning and improve users' trust. Social sciences suggest that the best explanations are contrastive, explaining not just why one action is taken, but why one action is taken instead of another. We formalize the notion of contrastive explanations for robotic planning policies based on Markov decision processes, drawing on insights from the social sciences. We present methods for the automated generation of contrastive explanations with three key factors: selectiveness, constrictiveness, and respo…
Open-Source, Cost-Aware Kinematically Feasible Planning for Mobile and Surface Robotics
Open Navigation LLC；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Locus Robotics；QUT Centre for Robotics and School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics（QUT机器人中心和电气工程与机器人学院）
State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing (HPCL)（高性能计算国家重点实验室）；School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学计算机学院）
Recent years have witnessed the prosperity of robots and in order to support consensus and cooperation for multi-robot system, wireless communications and networking among robots and the infrastructure have become indispensable. In this technical note, we first provide an overview of the research contributions on communication-aware motion planning (CAMP) in designing wireless-connected robotic networks (WCRNs), where the degree-of-freedom (DoF) provided by motion and communication capabilities embraced by the robots have not been fully exploited. Therefore, we propose the framework of joint c…
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Federal Research Center for Computer Science and Control of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）
This paper considers a problem of planning an attack in robotic football (RoboCup). The problem is reduced to finding a trajectory of the ball from its current position to the opponents goals. Heuristic search algorithm, i.e. A*, is used to find such a trajectory. For this algorithm to be applicable we introduce a discretized model of the environment, i.e. a graph, as well as the core search components: cost function and heuristic function. Both are designed to take into account all the available information of the game state. We extensively evaluate the suggested approach in simulation compar…
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；X, The Moonshot Factory（X（登月工厂））；Intrinsic Innovation LLC（Intrinsic创新有限责任公司）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in human's daily manipulation, contact between arms and obstacles is prevalent and even necessary. This paper investigates the benefit of allowing safe contact during robotic manipulation and advocates generating and tracking compliance reference signals in both operational and null spaces. In addition, to optimize the collision-allowed trajectories, we present a hyb…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico（高等技术学院系统与机器人研究所）
As access to space and robotic autonomy capabilities move forward, there is simultaneously a growing interest in deploying large, complex space structures to provide new on-orbit capabilities. New space-borne observatories, large orbital outposts, and even futuristic on-orbit manufacturing will be enabled by robotic assembly of space structures using techniques like on-orbit additive manufacturing which can provide flexibility in constructing and even repairing complex hardware. However, the dynamics underlying the robotic assembler during manipulation may operate under inertial uncertainties.…
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；AUTOLAB at UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校自动实验室）
The growing demand of industrial, automotive and service robots presents a challenge to the centralized Cloud Robotics model in terms of privacy, security, latency, bandwidth, and reliability. In this paper, we present a `Fog Robotics' approach to deep robot learning that distributes compute, storage and networking resources between the Cloud and the Edge in a federated manner. Deep models are trained on non-private (public) synthetic images in the Cloud; the models are adapted to the private real images of the environment at the Edge within a trusted network and subsequently, deployed as a se…
There are many application fields for robotic systems including service robotics, search and rescue missions, industry and space robotics. As the scenarios in these areas grow more and more complex, there is a high demand for powerful tools to efficiently program heterogeneous robotic systems. Therefore, we created RAFCON, a graphical tool to develop robotic tasks and to be used for mission control by remotely monitoring the execution of the tasks. To define the tasks, we use state machines which support hierarchies and concurrency. Together with a library concept, even complex scenarios can b…
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…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Automated planning enables robots to find plans to achieve complex, long-horizon tasks, given a planning domain. This planning domain consists of a list of actions, with their associated preconditions and effects, and is usually manually defined by a human expert, which is very time-consuming or even infeasible. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for generating this domain automatically from human demonstrations. First, we automatically segment and recognize the different observed actions from human demonstrations. From these demonstrations, the relevant preconditions and effects are o…
DecompGrind: A Decomposition Framework for Robotic Grinding via Cutting-Surface Planning and Contact-Force Adaptation
Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST)（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Keio University（庆应义塾大学）；Kyoto University（京都大学）；Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR)（国际电气通信基础技术研究所）
This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions address several fundamental challenges of robotic inspection and exploration, and specifically those of optimal coverage planning given an a priori known model of the structure to be inspected, full coverage, optimized and fast inspection path planning, as well as efficient exploration of completely unknown environments and structures. All of the developed path pl…
There is a growing interest on formal methods-based robotic planning for temporal logic objectives. In this work, we extend the scope of existing synthesis methods to hyper-temporal logics. We are motivated by the fact that important planning objectives, such as optimality, robustness, and privacy, (maybe implicitly) involve the interrelation between multiple paths. Such objectives are thus hyperproperties, and cannot be expressed with usual temporal logics like the linear temporal logic (LTL). We show that such hyperproperties can be expressed by HyperLTL, an extension of LTL to multiple path…
We study optimal Multi-robot Path Planning (MPP) on graphs, in order to improve the efficiency of multi-robot system (MRS) in the warehouse-like environment. We propose a novel algorithm, OMRPP (One-way Multi-robot Path Planning) based on Integer programming (IP) method. We focus on reducing the cost caused by a set of robots moving from their initial configuration to goal configuration in the warehouse-like environment. The novelty of this work includes: (1) proposing a topological map extraction based on the property of warehouse-like environment to reduce the scale of constructed IP model; …
