8 research outputs found
Printing-while-moving: a new paradigm for large-scale robotic 3D Printing
Building and Construction have recently become an exciting application ground
for robotics. In particular, rapid progress in materials formulation and in
robotics technology has made robotic 3D Printing of concrete a promising
technique for in-situ construction. Yet, scalability remains an important
hurdle to widespread adoption: the printing systems (gantry- based or
arm-based) are often much larger than the structure to be printed, hence
cumbersome. Recently, a mobile printing system - a manipulator mounted on a
mobile base - was proposed to alleviate this issue: such a system, by moving
its base, can potentially print a structure larger than itself. However, the
proposed system could only print while being stationary, imposing thereby a
limit on the size of structures that can be printed in a single take. Here, we
develop a system that implements the printing-while-moving paradigm, which
enables printing single-piece structures of arbitrary sizes with a single
robot. This development requires solving motion planning, localization, and
motion control problems that are specific to mobile 3D Printing. We report our
framework to address those problems, and demonstrate, for the first time, a
printing-while-moving experiment, wherein a 210 cm x 45 cm x 10 cm concrete
structure is printed by a robot arm that has a reach of 87 cm.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figur
Dexterous Manipulation Graphs
We propose the Dexterous Manipulation Graph as a tool to address in-hand
manipulation and reposition an object inside a robot's end-effector. This graph
is used to plan a sequence of manipulation primitives so to bring the object to
the desired end pose. This sequence of primitives is translated into motions of
the robot to move the object held by the end-effector. We use a dual arm robot
with parallel grippers to test our method on a real system and show successful
planning and execution of in-hand manipulation
Admittance control for collaborative dual-arm manipulation
Human-robot collaboration is an appealing solution to increase the flexibility of production lines. In this context, we propose a kinematic control strategy for dual-arm robotic platforms physically collaborating with human operators. Based on admittance control, our approach aims at improving the performance of object transportation tasks by acting on two levels: estimating and compensating gravity effects on one side, and considering human intention in the cooperative task space on the other. An experimental study using virtual reality reveals the effectiveness of our method in terms of reduced human energy expenditure
Towards Generalist Robots: A Promising Paradigm via Generative Simulation
This document serves as a position paper that outlines the authors' vision
for a potential pathway towards generalist robots. The purpose of this document
is to share the excitement of the authors with the community and highlight a
promising research direction in robotics and AI. The authors believe the
proposed paradigm is a feasible path towards accomplishing the long-standing
goal of robotics research: deploying robots, or embodied AI agents more
broadly, in various non-factory real-world settings to perform diverse tasks.
This document presents a specific idea for mining knowledge in the latest
large-scale foundation models for robotics research. Instead of directly using
or adapting these models to produce low-level policies and actions, it
advocates for a fully automated generative pipeline (termed as generative
simulation), which uses these models to generate diversified tasks, scenes and
training supervisions at scale, thereby scaling up low-level skill learning and
ultimately leading to a foundation model for robotics that empowers generalist
robots. The authors are actively pursuing this direction, but in the meantime,
they recognize that the ambitious goal of building generalist robots with
large-scale policy training demands significant resources such as computing
power and hardware, and research groups in academia alone may face severe
resource constraints in implementing the entire vision. Therefore, the authors
believe sharing their thoughts at this early stage could foster discussions,
attract interest towards the proposed pathway and related topics from industry
groups, and potentially spur significant technical advancements in the field