7,336 research outputs found
Fast and Continuous Foothold Adaptation for Dynamic Locomotion through CNNs
Legged robots can outperform wheeled machines for most navigation tasks
across unknown and rough terrains. For such tasks, visual feedback is a
fundamental asset to provide robots with terrain-awareness. However, robust
dynamic locomotion on difficult terrains with real-time performance guarantees
remains a challenge. We present here a real-time, dynamic foothold adaptation
strategy based on visual feedback. Our method adjusts the landing position of
the feet in a fully reactive manner, using only on-board computers and sensors.
The correction is computed and executed continuously along the swing phase
trajectory of each leg. To efficiently adapt the landing position, we implement
a self-supervised foothold classifier based on a Convolutional Neural Network
(CNN). Our method results in an up to 200 times faster computation with respect
to the full-blown heuristics. Our goal is to react to visual stimuli from the
environment, bridging the gap between blind reactive locomotion and purely
vision-based planning strategies. We assess the performance of our method on
the dynamic quadruped robot HyQ, executing static and dynamic gaits (at speeds
up to 0.5 m/s) in both simulated and real scenarios; the benefit of safe
foothold adaptation is clearly demonstrated by the overall robot behavior.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures. Accepted to RA-L + ICRA 2019, January 201
A Data-driven Model for Interaction-aware Pedestrian Motion Prediction in Object Cluttered Environments
This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction
approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When
navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion
predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly
influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in
their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior
from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding
pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a
new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle
space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the
added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world
datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that
our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very
computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for
motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially
in cluttered environments.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication at the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201
A Data-driven Model for Interaction-aware Pedestrian Motion Prediction in Object Cluttered Environments
This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction
approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When
navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion
predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly
influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in
their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior
from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding
pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a
new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle
space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the
added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world
datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that
our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very
computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for
motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially
in cluttered environments.Comment: 8 pages, accepted for publication at the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201
Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot
Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of
search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and
manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the
robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a
mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and
an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too
dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling
the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting.
Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of
control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a
set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to
control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The
integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed
promising performance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 201
Learning Manipulation under Physics Constraints with Visual Perception
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and
animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen
environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work,
we consider the problem of autonomous block stacking and explore solutions to
learning manipulation under physics constraints with visual perception inherent
to the task. Inspired by the intuitive physics in humans, we first present an
end-to-end learning-based approach to predict stability directly from
appearance, contrasting a more traditional model-based approach with explicit
3D representations and physical simulation. We study the model's behavior
together with an accompanied human subject test. It is then integrated into a
real-world robotic system to guide the placement of a single wood block into
the scene without collapsing existing tower structure. To further automate the
process of consecutive blocks stacking, we present an alternative approach
where the model learns the physics constraint through the interaction with the
environment, bypassing the dedicated physics learning as in the former part of
this work. In particular, we are interested in the type of tasks that require
the agent to reach a given goal state that may be different for every new
trial. Thereby we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns
policies for stacking tasks which are parametrized by a target structure.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.04861,
arXiv:1711.00267, arXiv:1604.0006
Learning Manipulation under Physics Constraints with Visual Perception
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we consider the problem of autonomous block stacking and explore solutions to learning manipulation under physics constraints with visual perception inherent to the task. Inspired by the intuitive physics in humans, we first present an end-to-end learning-based approach to predict stability directly from appearance, contrasting a more traditional model-based approach with explicit 3D representations and physical simulation. We study the model's behavior together with an accompanied human subject test. It is then integrated into a real-world robotic system to guide the placement of a single wood block into the scene without collapsing existing tower structure. To further automate the process of consecutive blocks stacking, we present an alternative approach where the model learns the physics constraint through the interaction with the environment, bypassing the dedicated physics learning as in the former part of this work. In particular, we are interested in the type of tasks that require the agent to reach a given goal state that may be different for every new trial. Thereby we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns policies for stacking tasks which are parametrized by a target structure
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