7 research outputs found
Robotic Learning the Sequence of Packing Irregular Objects from Human Demonstrations
We address the unsolved task of robotic bin packing with irregular objects,
such as groceries, where the underlying constraints on object placement and
manipulation, and the diverse objects' physical properties make preprogrammed
strategies unfeasible. Our approach is to learn directly from expert
demonstrations in order to extract implicit task knowledge and strategies to
achieve an efficient space usage, safe object positioning and to generate
human-like behaviors that enhance human-robot trust. We collect and make
available a novel and diverse dataset, BoxED, of box packing demonstrations by
humans in virtual reality. In total, 263 boxes were packed with
supermarket-like objects by 43 participants, yielding 4644 object
manipulations. We use the BoxED dataset to learn a Markov chain to predict the
object packing sequence for a given set of objects and compare it with human
performance. Our experimental results show that the model surpasses human
performance by generating sequence predictions that humans classify as
human-like more frequently than human-generated sequences.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
Learning at the Ends: From Hand to Tool Affordances in Humanoid Robots
One of the open challenges in designing robots that operate successfully in
the unpredictable human environment is how to make them able to predict what
actions they can perform on objects, and what their effects will be, i.e., the
ability to perceive object affordances. Since modeling all the possible world
interactions is unfeasible, learning from experience is required, posing the
challenge of collecting a large amount of experiences (i.e., training data).
Typically, a manipulative robot operates on external objects by using its own
hands (or similar end-effectors), but in some cases the use of tools may be
desirable, nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that while a robot can
collect many sensorimotor experiences using its own hands, this cannot happen
for all possible human-made tools.
Therefore, in this paper we investigate the developmental transition from
hand to tool affordances: what sensorimotor skills that a robot has acquired
with its bare hands can be employed for tool use? By employing a visual and
motor imagination mechanism to represent different hand postures compactly, we
propose a probabilistic model to learn hand affordances, and we show how this
model can generalize to estimate the affordances of previously unseen tools,
ultimately supporting planning, decision-making and tool selection tasks in
humanoid robots. We present experimental results with the iCub humanoid robot,
and we publicly release the collected sensorimotor data in the form of a hand
posture affordances dataset.Comment: dataset available at htts://vislab.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/, IEEE
International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic
Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob 2017
3DSGrasp: 3D Shape-Completion for Robotic Grasp
Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/NunoDuarte/3DSGrasp