816 research outputs found
Analysis and Observations from the First Amazon Picking Challenge
This paper presents a overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge
along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams.
The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a
warehouse shelf. This task is currently performed by human workers, and there
is hope that robots can someday help increase efficiency and throughput while
lowering cost. We report on a 28-question survey posed to the teams to learn
about each team's background, mechanism design, perception apparatus, planning
and control approach. We identify trends in this data, correlate it with each
team's success in the competition, and discuss observations and lessons learned
based on survey results and the authors' personal experiences during the
challenge
Mechanical Search: Multi-Step Retrieval of a Target Object Occluded by Clutter
When operating in unstructured environments such as warehouses, homes, and
retail centers, robots are frequently required to interactively search for and
retrieve specific objects from cluttered bins, shelves, or tables. Mechanical
Search describes the class of tasks where the goal is to locate and extract a
known target object. In this paper, we formalize Mechanical Search and study a
version where distractor objects are heaped over the target object in a bin.
The robot uses an RGBD perception system and control policies to iteratively
select, parameterize, and perform one of 3 actions -- push, suction, grasp --
until the target object is extracted, or either a time limit is exceeded, or no
high confidence push or grasp is available. We present a study of 5 algorithmic
policies for mechanical search, with 15,000 simulated trials and 300 physical
trials for heaps ranging from 10 to 20 objects. Results suggest that success
can be achieved in this long-horizon task with algorithmic policies in over 95%
of instances and that the number of actions required scales approximately
linearly with the size of the heap. Code and supplementary material can be
found at http://ai.stanford.edu/mech-search .Comment: To appear in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA), 2019. 9 pages with 4 figure
Hierarchical Policy Learning for Mechanical Search
Retrieving objects from clutters is a complex task, which requires multiple
interactions with the environment until the target object can be extracted.
These interactions involve executing action primitives like grasping or pushing
as well as setting priorities for the objects to manipulate and the actions to
execute. Mechanical Search (MS) is a framework for object retrieval, which uses
a heuristic algorithm for pushing and rule-based algorithms for high-level
planning. While rule-based policies profit from human intuition in how they
work, they usually perform sub-optimally in many cases. Deep reinforcement
learning (RL) has shown great performance in complex tasks such as taking
decisions through evaluating pixels, which makes it suitable for training
policies in the context of object-retrieval. In this work, we first formulate
the MS problem in a principled formulation as a hierarchical POMDP. Based on
this formulation, we propose a hierarchical policy learning approach for the MS
problem. For demonstration, we present two main parameterized sub-policies: a
push policy and an action selection policy. When integrated into the
hierarchical POMDP's policy, our proposed sub-policies increase the success
rate of retrieving the target object from less than 32% to nearly 80%, while
reducing the computation time for push actions from multiple seconds to less
than 10 milliseconds.Comment: ICRA 202
Learning to Efficiently Plan Robust Frictional Multi-Object Grasps
We consider a decluttering problem where multiple rigid convex polygonal
objects rest in randomly placed positions and orientations on a planar surface
and must be efficiently transported to a packing box using both single and
multi-object grasps. Prior work considered frictionless multi-object grasping.
In this paper, we introduce friction to increase picks per hour. We train a
neural network using real examples to plan robust multi-object grasps. In
physical experiments, we find a 13.7% increase in success rate, a 1.6x increase
in picks per hour, and a 6.3x decrease in grasp planning time compared to prior
work on multi-object grasping. Compared to single object grasping, we find a
3.1x increase in picks per hour
Learning Multi-step Robotic Manipulation Tasks through Visual Planning
Multi-step manipulation tasks in unstructured environments are extremely challenging for a robot to learn. Such tasks interlace high-level reasoning that consists of the expected states that can be attained to achieve an overall task and low-level reasoning that decides what actions will yield these states. A model-free deep reinforcement learning method is proposed to learn multi-step manipulation tasks. This work introduces a novel Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network (GR-ConvNet) model that can generate robust antipodal grasps from n-channel image input at real-time speeds (20ms). The proposed model architecture achieved a state-of-the-art accuracy on three standard grasping datasets. The adaptability of the proposed approach is demonstrated by directly transferring the trained model to a 7 DoF robotic manipulator with a grasp success rate of 95.4% and 93.0% on novel household and adversarial objects, respectively. A novel Robotic Manipulation Network (RoManNet) is introduced, which is a vision-based model architecture, to learn the action-value functions and predict manipulation action candidates. A Task Progress based Gaussian (TPG) reward function is defined to compute the reward based on actions that lead to successful motion primitives and progress towards the overall task goal. To balance the ratio of exploration/exploitation, this research introduces a Loss Adjusted Exploration (LAE) policy that determines actions from the action candidates according to the Boltzmann distribution of loss estimates. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by training RoManNet to learn several challenging multi-step robotic manipulation tasks in both simulation and real-world. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of success rate and action efficiency. The ablation studies show that TPG and LAE are especially beneficial for tasks like multiple block stacking
Affordance-Based Grasping Point Detection Using Graph Convolutional Networks for Industrial Bin-Picking Applications
Grasping point detection has traditionally been a core robotic and computer vision problem. In recent years, deep learning based methods have been widely used to predict grasping points, and have shown strong generalization capabilities under uncertainty. Particularly, approaches that aim at predicting object affordances without relying on the object identity, have obtained promising results in random bin-picking applications. However, most of them rely on RGB/RGB-D images, and it is not clear up to what extent 3D spatial information is used. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been successfully used for object classification and scene segmentation in point clouds, and also to predict grasping points in simple laboratory experimentation. In the present proposal, we adapted the Deep Graph Convolutional Network model with the intuition that learning from n-dimensional point clouds would lead to a performance boost to predict object affordances. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that GCNs are applied to predict affordances for suction and gripper end effectors in an industrial bin-picking environment. Additionally, we designed a bin-picking oriented data preprocessing pipeline which contributes to ease the learning process and to create a flexible solution for any bin-picking application. To train our models, we created a highly accurate RGB-D/3D dataset which is openly available on demand. Finally, we benchmarked our method against a 2D Fully Convolutional Network based method, improving the top-1 precision score by 1.8% and 1.7% for suction and gripper respectively.This Project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 780488
Advances in flexible manipulation through the application of AI-based techniques
282 p.Objektuak hartu eta uztea oinarrizko bi eragiketa dira ia edozein aplikazio robotikotan. Gaur egun, "pick and place" aplikazioetarako erabiltzen diren robot industrialek zeregin sinpleak eta errepikakorrak egiteko duten eraginkortasuna dute ezaugarri. Hala ere, sistema horiek oso zurrunak dira, erabat kontrolatutako inguruneetan lan egiten dute, eta oso kostu handia dakarte beste zeregin batzuk egiteko birprogramatzeak. Gaur egun, industria-ingurune desberdinetako zereginak daude (adibidez, logistika-ingurune batean eskaerak prestatzea), zeinak objektuak malgutasunez manipulatzea eskatzen duten, eta oraindik ezin izan dira automatizatu beren izaera dela-eta. Automatizazioa zailtzen duten botila-lepo nagusiak manipulatu beharreko objektuen aniztasuna, roboten trebetasun falta eta kontrolatu gabeko ingurune dinamikoen ziurgabetasuna dira.Adimen artifizialak (AA) gero eta paper garrantzitsuagoa betetzen du robotikaren barruan, robotei zeregin konplexuak betetzeko beharrezko adimena ematen baitie. Gainera, AAk benetako esperientzia erabiliz portaera konplexuak ikasteko aukera ematen du, programazioaren kostua nabarmen murriztuz. Objektuak manipulatzeko egungo sistema robotikoen mugak ikusita, lan honen helburu nagusia manipulazio-sistemen malgutasuna handitzea da AAn oinarritutako algoritmoak erabiliz, birprogramatu beharrik gabe ingurune dinamikoetara egokitzeko beharrezko gaitasunak emanez
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