Retrieving an object from cluttered spaces suchas cupboards, refrigerators, or bins requires tracking objects with limited or no visual sensing. In these scenarios, contact feedback is necessary to estimate the pose of the objects, yet the objects are movable while their shapes and number may be unknown, making the association of contacts with objects extremely difficult. While previous work has focused on multi-target tracking, the assumptions therein prohibit using prior methods given only the contact-sensing modality. Instead, this paper proposes the method Soft Tracking Using Contacts for Cluttered Objects (STUCCO) that tracks the belief over contact point locations and implicit object associations using a particle filter. This method allows ambiguous object associations of past contacts to be revised as new information becomes available. We apply STUCCO to the Blind Object Retrieval problem, where a target object of known shape but unknown pose must be retrieved from clutter. Our results suggest that our method outperforms baselines in four simulation environments, and on a real robot, where contact sensing is noisy. In simulation, we achieve grasp success of at least 65% on all environments while no baselines achieve over 5%.
Geometry-Aware Safety-Critical Local Reactive Controller for Robot Navigation in Unknown and Cluttered Environments
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(香港科技大学);Hong Kong Baptist University(香港浸会大学);The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)(香港科技大学(广州))
A Tactile-based Interactive Motion Planner for Robots in Unknown Cluttered Environments
Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems(上海智能自主系统研究院);State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems(自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室);Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems(智能自主系统前沿科学中心);College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University(同济大学电子与信息学院)
RSPT: Reconstruct Surroundings and Predict Trajectories for Generalizable Active Object Tracking
Peking University(北京大学);Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI)(北京通用人工智能研究院);Shandong University(山东大学);Zhengzhou University(郑州大学)