Abstract
Autonomous manipulation in unstructured environments will enable a large variety of exciting and important applications. Despite its promise, autonomous manipulation remains largely unsolved. Even the most rudimentary manipulation task—such as removing objects from a pile—remains challenging for robots. We identify three major challenges that must be addressed to enable autonomous manipulation: object segmentation, action selection, and motion generation. These challenges become more pronounced when unknown man-made or natural objects are cluttered together in a pile. We present a system capable of manipulating unknown objects in such an environment. Our robot is tasked with clearing a table by removing objects from a pile and placing them into a bin. To that end, we address the three aforementioned challenges. Our robot perceives the environment with an RGB-D sensor, segmenting the pile into object hypotheses using non-parametric surface models. Our system then computes the affordances of each object, and selects the best affordance and its associated action to execute. Finally, our robot instantiates the proper compliant motion primitive to safely execute the desired action. For efficient and reliable action selection, we developed a framework for supervised learning of manipulation expertise. To verify the performance of our system, we conducted dozens of trials and report on several hours of experiments involving more than 1,500 interactions. The results show that our learning-based approach for pile manipulation outperforms a common sense heuristic as well as a random strategy, and is on par with human action selection.
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We scale each feature \(f_i\) using its mean \(E(f_i)\) and variance \(V(f_i)\). \(f_i^{scaled} = (f_i-E(f_i))/\sqrt{Var(f_i)}\). If a scaled feature is more than two standard deviations away from the mean, we cap \(f_i^{scaled}\) at either \(-2\) or \(2\). Finally, we divide \(f_i^{scaled}\) by \(2\) to guarantee that all features are in the range \([-1,1]\).
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Acknowledgments
This work was conducted in part through collaborative participation in the Robotics Consortium sponsored by the U.S Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement W911NF-10-2-0016 and also in part by Intel (Embedded Technology Intel Science and Technology Center). The authors also gratefully acknowledge funding under the DARPA Autonomous Robotic Manipulation Software Track (ARM-S) program.
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Katz, D., Venkatraman, A., Kazemi, M. et al. Perceiving, learning, and exploiting object affordances for autonomous pile manipulation. Auton Robot 37, 369–382 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-014-9407-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-014-9407-y