2,979 research outputs found
Tactile Mapping and Localization from High-Resolution Tactile Imprints
This work studies the problem of shape reconstruction and object localization
using a vision-based tactile sensor, GelSlim. The main contributions are the
recovery of local shapes from contact, an approach to reconstruct the tactile
shape of objects from tactile imprints, and an accurate method for object
localization of previously reconstructed objects. The algorithms can be applied
to a large variety of 3D objects and provide accurate tactile feedback for
in-hand manipulation. Results show that by exploiting the dense tactile
information we can reconstruct the shape of objects with high accuracy and do
on-line object identification and localization, opening the door to reactive
manipulation guided by tactile sensing. We provide videos and supplemental
information in the project's website
http://web.mit.edu/mcube/research/tactile_localization.html.Comment: ICRA 2019, 7 pages, 7 figures. Website:
http://web.mit.edu/mcube/research/tactile_localization.html Video:
https://youtu.be/uMkspjmDbq
Robots for Exploration, Digital Preservation and Visualization of Archeological Sites
Monitoring and conservation of archaeological sites
are important activities necessary to prevent damage or to
perform restoration on cultural heritage. Standard techniques,
like mapping and digitizing, are typically used to document the
status of such sites. While these task are normally accomplished
manually by humans, this is not possible when dealing with
hard-to-access areas. For example, due to the possibility of
structural collapses, underground tunnels like catacombs are
considered highly unstable environments. Moreover, they are full
of radioactive gas radon that limits the presence of people only
for few minutes. The progress recently made in the artificial
intelligence and robotics field opened new possibilities for mobile
robots to be used in locations where humans are not allowed
to enter. The ROVINA project aims at developing autonomous
mobile robots to make faster, cheaper and safer the monitoring of
archaeological sites. ROVINA will be evaluated on the catacombs
of Priscilla (in Rome) and S. Gennaro (in Naples)
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
Realtime State Estimation with Tactile and Visual sensing. Application to Planar Manipulation
Accurate and robust object state estimation enables successful object
manipulation. Visual sensing is widely used to estimate object poses. However,
in a cluttered scene or in a tight workspace, the robot's end-effector often
occludes the object from the visual sensor. The robot then loses visual
feedback and must fall back on open-loop execution.
In this paper, we integrate both tactile and visual input using a framework
for solving the SLAM problem, incremental smoothing and mapping (iSAM), to
provide a fast and flexible solution. Visual sensing provides global pose
information but is noisy in general, whereas contact sensing is local, but its
measurements are more accurate relative to the end-effector. By combining them,
we aim to exploit their advantages and overcome their limitations. We explore
the technique in the context of a pusher-slider system. We adapt iSAM's
measurement cost and motion cost to the pushing scenario, and use an
instrumented setup to evaluate the estimation quality with different object
shapes, on different surface materials, and under different contact modes
Invariant EKF Design for Scan Matching-aided Localization
Localization in indoor environments is a technique which estimates the
robot's pose by fusing data from onboard motion sensors with readings of the
environment, in our case obtained by scan matching point clouds captured by a
low-cost Kinect depth camera. We develop both an Invariant Extended Kalman
Filter (IEKF)-based and a Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter (MEKF)-based
solution to this problem. The two designs are successfully validated in
experiments and demonstrate the advantage of the IEKF design
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