394 research outputs found
What Can I Do Around Here? Deep Functional Scene Understanding for Cognitive Robots
For robots that have the capability to interact with the physical environment
through their end effectors, understanding the surrounding scenes is not merely
a task of image classification or object recognition. To perform actual tasks,
it is critical for the robot to have a functional understanding of the visual
scene. Here, we address the problem of localizing and recognition of functional
areas from an arbitrary indoor scene, formulated as a two-stage deep learning
based detection pipeline. A new scene functionality testing-bed, which is
complied from two publicly available indoor scene datasets, is used for
evaluation. Our method is evaluated quantitatively on the new dataset,
demonstrating the ability to perform efficient recognition of functional areas
from arbitrary indoor scenes. We also demonstrate that our detection model can
be generalized onto novel indoor scenes by cross validating it with the images
from two different datasets
Discovering Affordances Through Perception and Manipulation
International audienceConsidering perception as an observation process only is the very reason for which robotic perception methods are to date unable to provide a general capacity of scene understanding. Related work in neuroscience has shown that there is a strong relationship between perception and action. We believe that considering perception in relation to action requires to interpret the scene in terms of the agent's own potential capabilities. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian approach for learning sensorimotor representations through the interaction between action and observation capabilities. We represent the notion of affordance as a probabilistic relation between three elements: objects, actions and effects. Experiments for affordances discovery were performed on a real robotic platform in an unsupervised way assuming a limited set of innate capabilities. Results show dependency relations that connect the three elements in a common frame: affordances. The increasing number of interactions and observations results in a Bayesian network that captures the relationships between them. The learned representation can be used for prediction tasks
Data-Driven Grasp Synthesis - A Survey
We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for
sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three
groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown
objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and
perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis
technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that
are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar
objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of
previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown
objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are
indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different
methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We
also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic
formulations.Comment: 20 pages, 30 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic
Spatial representation for planning and executing robot behaviors in complex environments
Robots are already improving our well-being and productivity in
different applications such as industry, health-care and indoor
service applications. However, we are still far from developing (and
releasing) a fully functional robotic agent that can autonomously
survive in tasks that require human-level
cognitive capabilities. Robotic systems on the market, in fact, are
designed to address specific applications, and can only run
pre-defined behaviors to robustly repeat few tasks (e.g., assembling
objects parts, vacuum cleaning). They internal representation of the
world is usually constrained to the task they are performing, and
does not allows for generalization to other
scenarios. Unfortunately, such a paradigm only apply to a very
limited set of domains, where the environment can be assumed to be
static, and its dynamics can be handled before
deployment. Additionally, robots configured in this way will
eventually fail if their "handcrafted'' representation of the
environment does not match the external world.
Hence, to enable more sophisticated cognitive skills, we investigate
how to design robots to properly represent the environment and
behave accordingly. To this end, we formalize a representation of
the environment that enhances the robot spatial knowledge to
explicitly include a representation of its own actions. Spatial
knowledge constitutes the core of the robot understanding of the
environment, however it is not sufficient to represent what the
robot is capable to do in it. To overcome such a limitation, we
formalize SK4R, a spatial knowledge representation for robots which
enhances spatial knowledge with a novel and "functional"
point of view that explicitly models robot actions. To this end, we
exploit the concept of affordances, introduced to express
opportunities (actions) that objects offer to an agent. To encode
affordances within SK4R, we define the "affordance
semantics" of actions that is used to annotate an environment, and
to represent to which extent robot actions support goal-oriented
behaviors.
We demonstrate the benefits of a functional representation of the
environment in multiple robotic scenarios that traverse and
contribute different research topics relating to: robot knowledge
representations, social robotics, multi-robot systems and robot
learning and planning. We show how a domain-specific representation,
that explicitly encodes affordance semantics, provides the robot
with a more concrete understanding of the environment and of the
effects that its actions have on it. The goal of our work is to
design an agent that will no longer execute an action, because of
mere pre-defined routine, rather, it will execute an actions because
it "knows'' that the resulting state leads one step closer to
success in its task
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