969 research outputs found
Manipulating Highly Deformable Materials Using a Visual Feedback Dictionary
The complex physical properties of highly deformable materials such as
clothes pose significant challenges fanipulation systems. We present a novel
visual feedback dictionary-based method for manipulating defoor autonomous
robotic mrmable objects towards a desired configuration. Our approach is based
on visual servoing and we use an efficient technique to extract key features
from the RGB sensor stream in the form of a histogram of deformable model
features. These histogram features serve as high-level representations of the
state of the deformable material. Next, we collect manipulation data and use a
visual feedback dictionary that maps the velocity in the high-dimensional
feature space to the velocity of the robotic end-effectors for manipulation. We
have evaluated our approach on a set of complex manipulation tasks and
human-robot manipulation tasks on different cloth pieces with varying material
characteristics.Comment: The video is available at goo.gl/mDSC4
A group-theoretic approach to formalizing bootstrapping problems
The bootstrapping problem consists in designing agents that learn a model of themselves and the world, and utilize it to achieve useful tasks. It is different from other learning problems as the agent starts with uninterpreted observations and commands, and with minimal prior information about the world. In this paper, we give a mathematical formalization of this aspect of the problem. We argue that the vague constraint of having "no prior information" can be recast as a precise algebraic condition on the agent: that its behavior is invariant to particular classes of nuisances on the world, which we show can be well represented by actions of groups (diffeomorphisms, permutations, linear transformations) on observations and commands. We then introduce the class of bilinear gradient dynamics sensors (BGDS) as a candidate for learning generic robotic sensorimotor cascades. We show how framing the problem as rejection of group nuisances allows a compact and modular analysis of typical preprocessing stages, such as learning the topology of the sensors. We demonstrate learning and using such models on real-world range-finder and camera data from publicly available datasets
- …