1,004 research outputs found
Sim2Real View Invariant Visual Servoing by Recurrent Control
Humans are remarkably proficient at controlling their limbs and tools from a
wide range of viewpoints and angles, even in the presence of optical
distortions. In robotics, this ability is referred to as visual servoing:
moving a tool or end-point to a desired location using primarily visual
feedback. In this paper, we study how viewpoint-invariant visual servoing
skills can be learned automatically in a robotic manipulation scenario. To this
end, we train a deep recurrent controller that can automatically determine
which actions move the end-point of a robotic arm to a desired object. The
problem that must be solved by this controller is fundamentally ambiguous:
under severe variation in viewpoint, it may be impossible to determine the
actions in a single feedforward operation. Instead, our visual servoing system
must use its memory of past movements to understand how the actions affect the
robot motion from the current viewpoint, correcting mistakes and gradually
moving closer to the target. This ability is in stark contrast to most visual
servoing methods, which either assume known dynamics or require a calibration
phase. We show how we can learn this recurrent controller using simulated data
and a reinforcement learning objective. We then describe how the resulting
model can be transferred to a real-world robot by disentangling perception from
control and only adapting the visual layers. The adapted model can servo to
previously unseen objects from novel viewpoints on a real-world Kuka IIWA
robotic arm. For supplementary videos, see:
https://fsadeghi.github.io/Sim2RealViewInvariantServoComment: Supplementary video:
https://fsadeghi.github.io/Sim2RealViewInvariantServ
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
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 Multi-Robot Cooperation Framework for Sewing Personalized Stent Grafts
This paper presents a multi-robot system for manufacturing personalized
medical stent grafts. The proposed system adopts a modular design, which
includes: a (personalized) mandrel module, a bimanual sewing module, and a
vision module. The mandrel module incorporates the personalized geometry of
patients, while the bimanual sewing module adopts a learning-by-demonstration
approach to transfer human hand-sewing skills to the robots. The human
demonstrations were firstly observed by the vision module and then encoded
using a statistical model to generate the reference motion trajectories. During
autonomous robot sewing, the vision module plays the role of coordinating
multi-robot collaboration. Experiment results show that the robots can adapt to
generalized stent designs. The proposed system can also be used for other
manipulation tasks, especially for flexible production of customized products
and where bimanual or multi-robot cooperation is required.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Informatics, Key words: modularity, medical device customization, multi-robot
system, robot learning, visual servoing, robot sewin
A Multi-Robot Cooperation Framework for Sewing Personalized Stent Grafts
This paper presents a multi-robot system for manufacturing personalized
medical stent grafts. The proposed system adopts a modular design, which
includes: a (personalized) mandrel module, a bimanual sewing module, and a
vision module. The mandrel module incorporates the personalized geometry of
patients, while the bimanual sewing module adopts a learning-by-demonstration
approach to transfer human hand-sewing skills to the robots. The human
demonstrations were firstly observed by the vision module and then encoded
using a statistical model to generate the reference motion trajectories. During
autonomous robot sewing, the vision module plays the role of coordinating
multi-robot collaboration. Experiment results show that the robots can adapt to
generalized stent designs. The proposed system can also be used for other
manipulation tasks, especially for flexible production of customized products
and where bimanual or multi-robot cooperation is required.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Informatics, Key words: modularity, medical device customization, multi-robot
system, robot learning, visual servoing, robot sewin
- …