Data-Driven Grasp Synthesis - A Survey

We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic formulations.Comment: 20 pages, 30 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic

Policy Learning with Hypothesis based Local Action Selection

For robots to be able to manipulate in unknown and unstructured environments the robot should be capable of operating under partial observability of the environment. Object occlusions and unmodeled environments are some of the factors that result in partial observability. A common scenario where this is encountered is manipulation in clutter. In the case that the robot needs to locate an object of interest and manipulate it, it needs to perform a series of decluttering actions to accurately detect the object of interest. To perform such a series of actions, the robot also needs to account for the dynamics of objects in the environment and how they react to contact. This is a non trivial problem since one needs to reason not only about robot-object interactions but also object-object interactions in the presence of contact. In the example scenario of manipulation in clutter, the state vector would have to account for the pose of the object of interest and the structure of the surrounding environment. The process model would have to account for all the aforementioned robot-object, object-object interactions. The complexity of the process model grows exponentially as the number of objects in the scene increases. This is commonly the case in unstructured environments. Hence it is not reasonable to attempt to model all object-object and robot-object interactions explicitly. Under this setting we propose a hypothesis based action selection algorithm where we construct a hypothesis set of the possible poses of an object of interest given the current evidence in the scene and select actions based on our current set of hypothesis. This hypothesis set tends to represent the belief about the structure of the environment and the number of poses the object of interest can take. The agent's only stopping criterion is when the uncertainty regarding the pose of the object is fully resolved.Comment: RLDM abstrac

Learning Manipulation under Physics Constraints with Visual Perception

Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we consider the problem of autonomous block stacking and explore solutions to learning manipulation under physics constraints with visual perception inherent to the task. Inspired by the intuitive physics in humans, we first present an end-to-end learning-based approach to predict stability directly from appearance, contrasting a more traditional model-based approach with explicit 3D representations and physical simulation. We study the model's behavior together with an accompanied human subject test. It is then integrated into a real-world robotic system to guide the placement of a single wood block into the scene without collapsing existing tower structure. To further automate the process of consecutive blocks stacking, we present an alternative approach where the model learns the physics constraint through the interaction with the environment, bypassing the dedicated physics learning as in the former part of this work. In particular, we are interested in the type of tasks that require the agent to reach a given goal state that may be different for every new trial. Thereby we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns policies for stacking tasks which are parametrized by a target structure.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.04861, arXiv:1711.00267, arXiv:1604.0006

The Coordinate Particle Filter - A novel Particle Filter for High Dimensional Systems

Parametric filters, such as the Extended Kalman Filter and the Unscented Kalman Filter, typically scale well with the dimensionality of the problem, but they are known to fail if the posterior state distribution cannot be closely approximated by a density of the assumed parametric form. For nonparametric filters, such as the Particle Filter, the converse holds. Such methods are able to approximate any posterior, but the computational requirements scale exponentially with the number of dimensions of the state space. In this paper, we present the Coordinate Particle Filter which alleviates this problem. We propose to compute the particle weights recursively, dimension by dimension. This allows us to explore one dimension at a time, and resample after each dimension if necessary. Experimental results on simulated as well as real data confirm that the proposed method has a substantial performance advantage over the Particle Filter in high-dimensional systems where not all dimensions are highly correlated. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method for the problem of multi-object and robotic manipulator tracking