Nagamanikandan Govindan, S. Ramesh, Asokan Thondiyath
{"title":"A new gripper that acts as an active and passive joint to facilitate prehensile grasping and locomotion","authors":"Nagamanikandan Govindan, S. Ramesh, Asokan Thondiyath","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981475","url":null,"abstract":"Among primates, the prehensile nature of the hand is vital for greater adaptability and a secure grip over the substrate/branches, particularly for arm-swinging motion or brachiation. Though various brachiation mechanisms that are mechanically equivalent to underactuated pendulum models are reported in the literature, not much attention has been given to the hand design that facilitates both locomotion and within-hand manipulation. In this paper, we propose a new robotic gripper design, equipped with shape conformable active gripping surfaces that can act as an active or passive joint and adapt to substrates with different shapes and sizes. A floating base serial chain, named GraspMaM, equipped with two such grippers, increases the versatility by performing a range of locomotion and manipulation modes without using dedicated systems. The unique gripper design allows the robot to estimate the passive joint state while arm-swinging and exhibits a dual relationship between manipulation and locomotion. We report the design details of the multimodal gripper and how it can be adapted for the brachiation motion assuming it as an articulated suspended pendulum model. Further, the system parameters of the physical prototype are estimated, and experimental results for the brachiation mode are discussed to validate and show the effectiveness of the proposed design.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124001263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning Important Regions via Attention for Video Streaming on Cloud Robotics","authors":"Hayato Itsumi, Florian Beye, Charvi Vitthal, Koichi Nihei","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981132","url":null,"abstract":"Cloud robotics, i.e., controlling robots from the cloud, make it possible to perform more complex processes, make robots smaller, and coordinate multi-robots by sharing information between robots and utilizing abundant computing resources. In cloud robotics, robots need to transmit videos to the cloud in real time to recognize their surroundings. Lowering the video quality reduces the bitrate in low bandwidth environments; however, this may lead to control errors and misrecognition due to lack of detailed image features. Even with 5G, bandwidth fluctuates widely, especially in moving robots, making it difficult to upload high quality video consistently. To reduce bitrate while preserving Quality of Control (QoC), we propose a method of learning the important regions for a pretrained autonomous agent using self-attention, and transmitting the video to the agent by controlling the image quality of each region on the basis of the estimated importance. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can maintain QoC while reducing the bitrate to 26% by setting important regions to high quality and the rest to low quality.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126150950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Apostolos Kalatzis, S.K. Hopko, Ranjana K. Mehta, Laura M. Stanley, Mike P. Wittie
{"title":"Sex Parity in Cognitive Fatigue Model Development for Effective Human-Robot Collaboration","authors":"Apostolos Kalatzis, S.K. Hopko, Ranjana K. Mehta, Laura M. Stanley, Mike P. Wittie","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981097","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, robots have become vital to achieving manufacturing competitiveness. Especially in industrial environments, a strong level of interaction is reached when humans and robots form a dynamic system that works together towards achieving a common goal or accomplishing a task. However, the human-robot collaboration can be cognitively demanding, potentially contributing to cognitive fatigue. Therefore, the consideration of cognitive fatigue becomes particularly important to ensure the efficiency and safety in the overall human-robot collaboration. Additionally, sex is an inevitable human factor that needs further investigation for machine learning model development given the perceptual and physiological differences between the sexes in responding to fatigue. As such, this study explored sex differences and labeling strategies in the development of machine learning models for cognitive fatigue detection. Sixteen participants, balanced by sex, recruited to perform a surface finishing task with a UR10 collaborative robot under fatigued and non-fatigued states. Fatigue perception and heart rate activity data collected throughout to create a dataset for cognitive fatigue detection. Equitable machine learning models developed based on perception (survey responses) and condition (fatigue manipulation). The labeling approach had a significant impact on the accuracy and F1-score, where perception-based labels lead to lower accuracy and F1-score for females likely due to sex differences in reporting of fatigue. Additionally, we observed a relationship between heart rate, algorithm type, and labeling approach, where heart rate was the most significant predictor for the two labeling approaches and for all the algorithms utilized. Understanding the implications of label type, algorithm type, and sex on the design of fatigue detection algorithms is essential to designing equitable fatigue-adaptive human-robot collaborations across the sexes.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129471584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Excavation of Fragmented Rocks with Multi-modal Model-based Reinforcement Learning","authors":"Yifan Zhu, Liyang Wang, Liangjun Zhang","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981537","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a multi-modal model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approach to the excavation of fragmented rocks, which are very challenging to model due to their highly variable sizes and geometries, and visual occlusions. A multi-modal recurrent neural network (RNN) learns the dynamics of bucket-terrain interaction from a small physical dataset, with a discrete set of motion primitives encoded with domain knowledge as the action space. Then a model predictive controller (MPC) tracks a global reference path using multi-modal feedback. We show that our RNN-based dynamics function achieves lower prediction errors compared to a feed-forward neural network baseline, and the MPC is able to significantly outperform manually designed strategies on such a challenging task.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128468724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Freddy Romero Leiro, A. Bazaei, S. Régnier, Mokrane Boudaoud
{"title":"A Micro-Robotic Approach for The Correction of Angular Deviations in AFM Samples From Generic Topographic Data","authors":"Freddy Romero Leiro, A. Bazaei, S. Régnier, Mokrane Boudaoud","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981512","url":null,"abstract":"This article proposes a method for the correction of angular deviations caused during the fixing process of samples prepared for Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). The correction is done using the angular control of a 6-DOF PPPS parallel platform were the sample is placed, while the AFM scan is performed by a 3-DOF serial cartesian robot with a tuning fork probe designed to perform FM-AFM. The method uses the generic x, y, and z data provided by the AFM after performing a scan on a free surface of the sample substrate. This is used to calculate the plane that closest approximates the points by solving a system of linear equations. This plane is then used to estimate the angular corrections that the 6-DOF parallel robot has to do in order to compensate the deviations. The proposed algorithm can be performed iteratively in order to refine the correction. The method also does not require any special preparation of the substrate. It only requires to have a free surface to scan. Experiments are performed using this algorithm to correct the orientation deviation of a substrate of V1 High-grade mica. The results show that the method is able to correct the angular deviation of the sample relatively to the AFM probe with an error of 0.2° after only two iterations of the algorithm.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128525606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. C. Rucker, E. Barth, Josh Gaston, James C. Gallentine
{"title":"Task-Space Control of Continuum Robots using Underactuated Discrete Rod Models","authors":"D. C. Rucker, E. Barth, Josh Gaston, James C. Gallentine","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982271","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982271","url":null,"abstract":"Underactuation is a core challenge associated with controlling soft and continuum robots, which possess theoreti-cally infinite degrees of freedom, but few actuators. However, $m$ actuators may still be used to control a dynamic soft robot in an m-dimensional output task space. In this paper we develop a task-space control approach for planar continuum robots that is robust to modeling error and requires very little sensor information. The controller is based on a highly underactuated discrete rod mechanics model in maximal coordinates and does not require conversion to a classical robot dynamics model form. This promotes straightforward control design, implementation and efficiency. We perform input-output feedback linearization on this model, apply sliding mode control to increase robustness, and formulate an observer to estimate the full state from sparse output measurements. Simulation results show exact task-space reference tracking behavior can be achieved even in the presence of significant modeling error, inaccurate initial conditions, and output-only sensing.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128723587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Multi-purpose Tactile Perception Based on Deep Learning in a New Tendon-driven Optical Tactile Sensor","authors":"Zhou Zhao, Zhenyu Lu","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981477","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we create a new tendon-connected multi-functional optical tactile sensor, MechTac, for object perception in the field of view (TacTip) and location of touching points in the blind area of vision (TacSide). In a multi-point touch task, the information of the TacSide and the TacTip are overlapped to commonly affect the distribution of papillae pins on the TacTip. Since the effects of TacSide are much less obvious to those affected on the TacTip, a perceiving out-of-view neural network (O2VNet) is created to separate the mixed information with unequal affection. To reduce the dependence of the O2VNet on the grayscale information of the image, we create one new binarized convolutional (BConv) layer in front of the backbone of the O2VNet. The O2VNet can not only achieve real-time temporal sequence prediction (34 ms per image), but also attain the average classification accuracy of 99.06%. The experimental results show that the O2VNet can hold a high classification accuracy even facing the image contrast changes.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128202378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cross-modal Fusion-based Prior Correction for Road Detection in Off-road Environments","authors":"Yuru Wang, Yi Sun, Jun Yu Li, Meiping Shi","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981350","url":null,"abstract":"Road detection plays a fundamental role in the visual navigation system of autonomous vehicles. However, it's still challenging to achieve robust road detection in off-road scenarios due to their complicated road appearances and ambiguous road structures. Therefore, existing image-based road detection approaches usually fail to extract the right routes due to the lack of the effective fusion of the image and prior reference paths(road guidances generated via map annotations and GPS localization). Besides, the reference paths are not always reliable because of GPS localization errors and mapping errors. To achieve robust road detection in off-road scenarios, we propose a prior-correction-based road detection network named PR-ROAD via fusing the cross-model information provided by both the reference path and the input image. These two heterogeneous data, prior and image, are deeply fused by a cross-attention module and formulate contextual inter-dependencies. We conduct experiments in our collected rural, off-road and urban datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method both on unstructured and structured roads.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127057395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Amanda Bouman, Joshua Ott, Sung-Kyun Kim, Kenny Chen, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, B. Lopez, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, J. Burdick
{"title":"Adaptive Coverage Path Planning for Efficient Exploration of Unknown Environments","authors":"Amanda Bouman, Joshua Ott, Sung-Kyun Kim, Kenny Chen, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, B. Lopez, Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, J. Burdick","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982287","url":null,"abstract":"We present a method for solving the coverage problem with the objective of autonomously exploring an unknown environment under mission time constraints. Here, the robot is tasked with planning a path over a horizon such that the accumulated area swept out by its sensor footprint is maximized. Because this problem exhibits a diminishing returns property known as submodularity, we choose to formulate it as a tree-based sequential decision making process. This formulation allows us to evaluate the effects of the robot's actions on future world coverage states, while simultaneously accounting for traversability risk and the dynamic constraints of the robot. To quickly find near-optimal solutions, we propose an effective approximation to the coverage sensor model which adapts to the local environment. Our method was extensively tested across various complex environments and served as the local exploration algorithm for a competing entry in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127285493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. D. Ang, Lester G. Librado, C. J. Salaan, Jonathan C. Maglasang, Kristine Sanchez, M. Ang
{"title":"Drone with Pneumatic-tethered Suction-based Perching Mechanism for High Payload Application","authors":"J. D. Ang, Lester G. Librado, C. J. Salaan, Jonathan C. Maglasang, Kristine Sanchez, M. Ang","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982219","url":null,"abstract":"Concrete infrastructures provide the means to connect cities and transport people and goods. They require regular inspection to assess their current conditions. Aerial work platforms and underbridge platforms or scaffolding are the common equipment used for inspection of elevated infrastructure. These methods often cost more to operate and maintain, are time-consuming, and raise risks for the inspector. One interesting field of research for UAVs that can be used for infrastructure inspection is aerial perching. A perching UAV can be loaded with an inspection apparatus foregoing the need for costly equipment and risks involved in the inspection. Many have presented aerial perching for various applications and not as much for applications related to concrete infrastructure inspection. This study investigates a perching UAV that can perform perching on both smooth and rough concrete surfaces. This paper presents an unmanned aerial system that utilizes a suction-based perching mechanism with a pneumatic supply tethered from the ground. The proposed perching mechanism provides a reliable and high payload capacity needed for non-destructive testing of the infrastructure. The paper introduces the concept, presents the design and proof of concept, and validates the idea through actual bridge experiments.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127421855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}