4,421 research outputs found
Learning to Represent Haptic Feedback for Partially-Observable Tasks
The sense of touch, being the earliest sensory system to develop in a human
body [1], plays a critical part of our daily interaction with the environment.
In order to successfully complete a task, many manipulation interactions
require incorporating haptic feedback. However, manually designing a feedback
mechanism can be extremely challenging. In this work, we consider manipulation
tasks that need to incorporate tactile sensor feedback in order to modify a
provided nominal plan. To incorporate partial observation, we present a new
framework that models the task as a partially observable Markov decision
process (POMDP) and learns an appropriate representation of haptic feedback
which can serve as the state for a POMDP model. The model, that is parametrized
by deep recurrent neural networks, utilizes variational Bayes methods to
optimize the approximate posterior. Finally, we build on deep Q-learning to be
able to select the optimal action in each state without access to a simulator.
We test our model on a PR2 robot for multiple tasks of turning a knob until it
clicks.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 201
Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing
Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many
people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently
lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people.
The physical implications of dressing are complicated by non-rigid garments,
which can result in a robot indirectly applying high forces to a person's body.
We present a deep recurrent model that, when given a proposed action by the
robot, predicts the forces a garment will apply to a person's body. We also
show that a robot can provide better dressing assistance by using this model
with model predictive control. The predictions made by our model only use
haptic and kinematic observations from the robot's end effector, which are
readily attainable. Collecting training data from real world physical
human-robot interaction can be time consuming, costly, and put people at risk.
Instead, we train our predictive model using data collected in an entirely
self-supervised fashion from a physics-based simulation. We evaluated our
approach with a PR2 robot that attempted to pull a hospital gown onto the arms
of 10 human participants. With a 0.2s prediction horizon, our controller
succeeded at high rates and lowered applied force while navigating the garment
around a persons fist and elbow without getting caught. Shorter prediction
horizons resulted in significantly reduced performance with the sleeve catching
on the participants' fists and elbows, demonstrating the value of our model's
predictions. These behaviors of mitigating catches emerged from our deep
predictive model and the controller objective function, which primarily
penalizes high forces.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Trajectory Deformations from Physical Human-Robot Interaction
Robots are finding new applications where physical interaction with a human
is necessary: manufacturing, healthcare, and social tasks. Accordingly, the
field of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) has leveraged impedance
control approaches, which support compliant interactions between human and
robot. However, a limitation of traditional impedance control is that---despite
provisions for the human to modify the robot's current trajectory---the human
cannot affect the robot's future desired trajectory through pHRI. In this
paper, we present an algorithm for physically interactive trajectory
deformations which, when combined with impedance control, allows the human to
modulate both the actual and desired trajectories of the robot. Unlike related
works, our method explicitly deforms the future desired trajectory based on
forces applied during pHRI, but does not require constant human guidance. We
present our approach and verify that this method is compatible with traditional
impedance control. Next, we use constrained optimization to derive the
deformation shape. Finally, we describe an algorithm for real time
implementation, and perform simulations to test the arbitration parameters.
Experimental results demonstrate reduction in the human's effort and
improvement in the movement quality when compared to pHRI with impedance
control alone
Virtual Texture Generated using Elastomeric Conductive Block Copolymer in Wireless Multimodal Haptic Glove.
Haptic devices are in general more adept at mimicking the bulk properties of materials than they are at mimicking the surface properties. This paper describes a haptic glove capable of producing sensations reminiscent of three types of near-surface properties: hardness, temperature, and roughness. To accomplish this mixed mode of stimulation, three types of haptic actuators were combined: vibrotactile motors, thermoelectric devices, and electrotactile electrodes made from a stretchable conductive polymer synthesized in our laboratory. This polymer consisted of a stretchable polyanion which served as a scaffold for the polymerization of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT). The scaffold was synthesized using controlled radical polymerization to afford material of low dispersity, relatively high conductivity (0.1 S cm-1), and low impedance relative to metals. The glove was equipped with flex sensors to make it possible to control a robotic hand and a hand in virtual reality (VR). In psychophysical experiments, human participants were able to discern combinations of electrotactile, vibrotactile, and thermal stimulation in VR. Participants trained to associate these sensations with roughness, hardness, and temperature had an overall accuracy of 98%, while untrained participants had an accuracy of 85%. Sensations could similarly be conveyed using a robotic hand equipped with sensors for pressure and temperature
ToolNet: Holistically-Nested Real-Time Segmentation of Robotic Surgical Tools
Real-time tool segmentation from endoscopic videos is an essential part of
many computer-assisted robotic surgical systems and of critical importance in
robotic surgical data science. We propose two novel deep learning architectures
for automatic segmentation of non-rigid surgical instruments. Both methods take
advantage of automated deep-learning-based multi-scale feature extraction while
trying to maintain an accurate segmentation quality at all resolutions. The two
proposed methods encode the multi-scale constraint inside the network
architecture. The first proposed architecture enforces it by cascaded
aggregation of predictions and the second proposed network does it by means of
a holistically-nested architecture where the loss at each scale is taken into
account for the optimization process. As the proposed methods are for real-time
semantic labeling, both present a reduced number of parameters. We propose the
use of parametric rectified linear units for semantic labeling in these small
architectures to increase the regularization ability of the design and maintain
the segmentation accuracy without overfitting the training sets. We compare the
proposed architectures against state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks.
We validate our methods using existing benchmark datasets, including ex vivo
cases with phantom tissue and different robotic surgical instruments present in
the scene. Our results show a statistically significant improved Dice
Similarity Coefficient over previous instrument segmentation methods. We
analyze our design choices and discuss the key drivers for improving accuracy.Comment: Paper accepted at IROS 201
- …