4,907 research outputs found
A hyper-redundant manipulator
“Hyper-redundant” manipulators have a very large number of actuatable degrees of freedom. The benefits of hyper-redundant robots include the ability to avoid obstacles, increased robustness with respect to mechanical failure, and the ability to perform new forms of robot locomotion and grasping. The authors examine hyper-redundant manipulator design criteria and the physical implementation of one particular design: a variable geometry truss
Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learning
Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between
non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing
can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers;
likewise, grasping can help displace objects to make pushing movements more
precise and collision-free. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to
discover and learn these synergies from scratch through model-free deep
reinforcement learning. Our method involves training two fully convolutional
networks that map from visual observations to actions: one infers the utility
of pushes for a dense pixel-wise sampling of end effector orientations and
locations, while the other does the same for grasping. Both networks are
trained jointly in a Q-learning framework and are entirely self-supervised by
trial and error, where rewards are provided from successful grasps. In this
way, our policy learns pushing motions that enable future grasps, while
learning grasps that can leverage past pushes. During picking experiments in
both simulation and real-world scenarios, we find that our system quickly
learns complex behaviors amid challenging cases of clutter, and achieves better
grasping success rates and picking efficiencies than baseline alternatives
after only a few hours of training. We further demonstrate that our method is
capable of generalizing to novel objects. Qualitative results (videos), code,
pre-trained models, and simulation environments are available at
http://vpg.cs.princeton.eduComment: To appear at the International Conference On Intelligent Robots and
Systems (IROS) 2018. Project webpage: http://vpg.cs.princeton.edu Summary
video: https://youtu.be/-OkyX7Zlhi
Real-Time Online Re-Planning for Grasping Under Clutter and Uncertainty
We consider the problem of grasping in clutter. While there have been motion
planners developed to address this problem in recent years, these planners are
mostly tailored for open-loop execution. Open-loop execution in this domain,
however, is likely to fail, since it is not possible to model the dynamics of
the multi-body multi-contact physical system with enough accuracy, neither is
it reasonable to expect robots to know the exact physical properties of
objects, such as frictional, inertial, and geometrical. Therefore, we propose
an online re-planning approach for grasping through clutter. The main challenge
is the long planning times this domain requires, which makes fast re-planning
and fluent execution difficult to realize. In order to address this, we propose
an easily parallelizable stochastic trajectory optimization based algorithm
that generates a sequence of optimal controls. We show that by running this
optimizer only for a small number of iterations, it is possible to perform real
time re-planning cycles to achieve reactive manipulation under clutter and
uncertainty.Comment: Published as a conference paper in IEEE Humanoids 201
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