13 research outputs found
Visual Closed-Loop Control for Pouring Liquids
Pouring a specific amount of liquid is a challenging task. In this paper we
develop methods for robots to use visual feedback to perform closed-loop
control for pouring liquids. We propose both a model-based and a model-free
method utilizing deep learning for estimating the volume of liquid in a
container. Our results show that the model-free method is better able to
estimate the volume. We combine this with a simple PID controller to pour
specific amounts of liquid, and show that the robot is able to achieve an
average 38ml deviation from the target amount. To our knowledge, this is the
first use of raw visual feedback to pour liquids in robotics.Comment: To appear at ICRA 201
Reasoning About Liquids via Closed-Loop Simulation
Simulators are powerful tools for reasoning about a robot's interactions with
its environment. However, when simulations diverge from reality, that reasoning
becomes less useful. In this paper, we show how to close the loop between
liquid simulation and real-time perception. We use observations of liquids to
correct errors when tracking the liquid's state in a simulator. Our results
show that closed-loop simulation is an effective way to prevent large
divergence between the simulated and real liquid states. As a direct
consequence of this, our method can enable reasoning about liquids that would
otherwise be infeasible due to large divergences, such as reasoning about
occluded liquid.Comment: Robotics: Science & Systems (RSS), July 12-16, 2017. Cambridge, MA,
US
Making Sense of Audio Vibration for Liquid Height Estimation in Robotic Pouring
In this paper, we focus on the challenging perception problem in robotic
pouring. Most of the existing approaches either leverage visual or haptic
information. However, these techniques may suffer from poor generalization
performances on opaque containers or concerning measuring precision. To tackle
these drawbacks, we propose to make use of audio vibration sensing and design a
deep neural network PouringNet to predict the liquid height from the audio
fragment during the robotic pouring task. PouringNet is trained on our
collected real-world pouring dataset with multimodal sensing data, which
contains more than 3000 recordings of audio, force feedback, video and
trajectory data of the human hand that performs the pouring task. Each record
represents a complete pouring procedure. We conduct several evaluations on
PouringNet with our dataset and robotic hardware. The results demonstrate that
our PouringNet generalizes well across different liquid containers, positions
of the audio receiver, initial liquid heights and types of liquid, and
facilitates a more robust and accurate audio-based perception for robotic
pouring.Comment: Checkout project page for video, code and dataset:
https://lianghongzhuo.github.io/AudioPourin
Force-based robot learning of pouring skills using parametric hidden Markov models
Presentado al 9th RoMoCo celebrado en Kuslin (Polonia) del 3 al 5 de julio de 2013.Robot learning from demonstration faces new challenges when applied to tasks in which forces play a key role. Pouring liquid from a bottle into a glass is one such task, where not just a motion with a certain force profile needs to be learned, but the motion is subtly conditioned by the amount of liquid in the bottle. In this paper, the pouring skill is taught to a robot as follows. In a training phase, the human teleoperates the robot using a haptic device, and data from the demonstrations are statistically encoded by a parametric hidden Markov model, which compactly encapsulates the relation between the task parameter (dependent on the bottle weight) and the force-torque traces. Gaussian mixture regression is then used at the reproduction stage for retrieving the suitable robot actions based on the force perceptions. Computational and experimental results show that the robot is able to learn to pour drinks using the proposed framework, outperforming other approaches such as the classical hidden Markov models in that it requires less training, yields more compact encodings and shows better generalization capabilities.This research is partially sponsored by the European projects STIFF-FLOP (FP7-ICT-287728), IntellAct (FP7-269959), and the Spanish project PAU+ (DPI2011-27510). L. Rozo was supported by the CSIC under a JAE-PREDOC scholarship.Peer Reviewe