Robot learning and error correction

A model of robot learning is described that associates previously unknown perceptions with the sensed known consequences of robot actions. For these actions, both the categories of outcomes and the corresponding sensory patterns are incorporated in a knowledge base by the system designer. Thus the robot is able to predict the outcome of an action and compare the expectation with the experience. New knowledge about what to expect in the world may then be incorporated by the robot in a pre-existing structure whether it detects accordance or discrepancy between a predicted consequence and experience. Errors committed during plan execution are detected by the same type of comparison process and learning may be applied to avoiding the errors

Autonomy Infused Teleoperation with Application to BCI Manipulation

Robot teleoperation systems face a common set of challenges including latency, low-dimensional user commands, and asymmetric control inputs. User control with Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) exacerbates these problems through especially noisy and erratic low-dimensional motion commands due to the difficulty in decoding neural activity. We introduce a general framework to address these challenges through a combination of computer vision, user intent inference, and arbitration between the human input and autonomous control schemes. Adjustable levels of assistance allow the system to balance the operator's capabilities and feelings of comfort and control while compensating for a task's difficulty. We present experimental results demonstrating significant performance improvement using the shared-control assistance framework on adapted rehabilitation benchmarks with two subjects implanted with intracortical brain-computer interfaces controlling a seven degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator as a prosthetic. Our results further indicate that shared assistance mitigates perceived user difficulty and even enables successful performance on previously infeasible tasks. We showcase the extensibility of our architecture with applications to quality-of-life tasks such as opening a door, pouring liquids from containers, and manipulation with novel objects in densely cluttered environments

Exploitation of environmental constraints in human and robotic grasping

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.We investigate the premise that robust grasping performance is enabled by exploiting constraints present in the environment. These constraints, leveraged through motion in contact, counteract uncertainty in state variables relevant to grasp success. Given this premise, grasping becomes a process of successive exploitation of environmental constraints, until a successful grasp has been established. We present support for this view found through the analysis of human grasp behavior and by showing robust robotic grasping based on constraint-exploiting grasp strategies. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to design robotic hands with inherent capabilities for the exploitation of environmental constraints

Exploitation of environmental constraints in human and robotic grasping

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.We investigate the premise that robust grasping performance is enabled by exploiting constraints present in the environment. These constraints, leveraged through motion in contact, counteract uncertainty in state variables relevant to grasp success. Given this premise, grasping becomes a process of successive exploitation of environmental constraints, until a successful grasp has been established. We present support for this view found through the analysis of human grasp behavior and by showing robust robotic grasping based on constraint-exploiting grasp strategies. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to design robotic hands with inherent capabilities for the exploitation of environmental constraints

Recognising the Clothing Categories from Free-Configuration Using Gaussian-Process-Based Interactive Perception

In this paper, we propose a Gaussian Process- based interactive perception approach for recognising highly- wrinkled clothes. We have integrated this recognition method within a clothes sorting pipeline for the pre-washing stage of an autonomous laundering process. Our approach differs from reported clothing manipulation approaches by allowing the robot to update its perception confidence via numerous interactions with the garments. The classifiers predominantly reported in clothing perception (e.g. SVM, Random Forest) studies do not provide true classification probabilities, due to their inherent structure. In contrast, probabilistic classifiers (of which the Gaussian Process is a popular example) are able to provide predictive probabilities. In our approach, we employ a multi-class Gaussian Process classification using the Laplace approximation for posterior inference and optimising hyper-parameters via marginal likelihood maximisation. Our experimental results show that our approach is able to recognise unknown garments from highly-occluded and wrinkled con- figurations and demonstrates a substantial improvement over non-interactive perception approaches

Occlusion reasoning for multiple object visual tracking

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityOcclusion reasoning for visual object tracking in uncontrolled environments is a challenging problem. It becomes significantly more difficult when dense groups of indistinguishable objects are present in the scene that cause frequent inter-object interactions and occlusions. We present several practical solutions that tackle the inter-object occlusions for video surveillance applications. In particular, this thesis proposes three methods. First, we propose "reconstruction-tracking," an online multi-camera spatial-temporal data association method for tracking large groups of objects imaged with low resolution. As a variant of the well-known Multiple-Hypothesis-Tracker, our approach localizes the positions of objects in 3D space with possibly occluded observations from multiple camera views and performs temporal data association in 3D. Second, we develop "track linking," a class of offline batch processing algorithms for long-term occlusions, where the decision has to be made based on the observations from the entire tracking sequence. We construct a graph representation to characterize occlusion events and propose an efficient graph-based/combinatorial algorithm to resolve occlusions. Third, we propose a novel Bayesian framework where detection and data association are combined into a single module and solved jointly. Almost all traditional tracking systems address the detection and data association tasks separately in sequential order. Such a design implies that the output of the detector has to be reliable in order to make the data association work. Our framework takes advantage of the often complementary nature of the two subproblems, which not only avoids the error propagation issue from which traditional "detection-tracking approaches" suffer but also eschews common heuristics such as "nonmaximum suppression" of hypotheses by modeling the likelihood of the entire image. The thesis describes a substantial number of experiments, involving challenging, notably distinct simulated and real data, including infrared and visible-light data sets recorded ourselves or taken from data sets publicly available. In these videos, the number of objects ranges from a dozen to a hundred per frame in both monocular and multiple views. The experiments demonstrate that our approaches achieve results comparable to those of state-of-the-art approaches