Zhihao Li, Pengfei Zeng, Jionglong Su, Qingda Guo, Ning Ding, Jiaming Zhang
{"title":"CPQNet: Contact Points Quality Network for Robotic Grasping","authors":"Zhihao Li, Pengfei Zeng, Jionglong Su, Qingda Guo, Ning Ding, Jiaming Zhang","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981372","url":null,"abstract":"In typical data-based grasping methods, a grasp based on parallel-jaw grippers is parameterized by the center of the gripper, the rotation angle, and the gripper opening width so as to predict the quality and pose of grasps at every pixel. In contrast, a grasp is represented using only two contact points for contact-points-based grasp representation, which allows for fusion with tactile sensors more naturally. In this work, we propose a method using contact-points-based grasp representation to get a robust grasp using only one contact points quality map generated by a neural network, which significantly reduces the complexity of the network with fewer parameters. We provide a synthetic dataset including depth image and contact points quality map generated by thousands of 3D models. We also provide the method for data generation, which can be used for contact-points-based multi-fingers grasp. Experiments show that contact points quality network can plan an available grasp in 0.15 seconds. The grasping success rate for unknown household objects is 94%. Our method is also available for deformable objects with a success rate of 95%. The dataset and reference code can be found on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/cpqnet.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"557 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":"116518062","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":"Distributed Coach-Based Reinforcement Learning Controller for Snake Robot Locomotion","authors":"Yuanyuan Jia, Shugen Ma","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981749","url":null,"abstract":"Reinforcement learning commonly suffers from slow convergence speed and requires thousands of episodes, which makes it hard to be applied for physical robotic applications. Little research has been studied for snake robot control using RL because of the additional difficulty of high redundancy of freedom. Existing methods either adopts an asynchronous A3C structure or a joint state representation. We propose a distributed coach-based deep learning method for snake robot control, which can greatly expedite the training speed with less episodes. The major contributions include: 1) a completely distributed graphical formulation; 2) an explicit stochastic density propagation rule for each robot link; 3) various interaction models with uncertainty estimation. The preliminary results of both simulation and real-world experiments have demonstrated the promising performance in comparison with state-of-the-art.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"41 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":"122489774","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":"Efficiently Learning Manipulations by Selecting Structured Skill Representations","authors":"Mohit Sharma, Oliver Kroemer","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981422","url":null,"abstract":"A key challenge in learning to perform manipulation tasks is selecting a suitable skill representation. While specific skill representations are often easier to learn, they are often only suitable for a narrow set of tasks. In most prior works, roboticists manually provide the robot with a suitable skill representation to use e.g. a neural network or DMPs. By contrast, we propose to allow the robot to select the most appropriate skill representation for the underlying task. Given the large space of skill representations, we utilize a single demonstration to select a small set of potential task-relevant representations. This set is then further refined using reinforcement learning to select the most suitable skill representation. Experiments in both simulation and real world show how our proposed approach leads to improved sample efficiency and enables directly learning on the real robot.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"724 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":"122776822","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-Robot Dynamic Swarm Disablement","authors":"Ori Fogler, Noam Agmon","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982075","url":null,"abstract":"Motivated by the use of robots for pest control in agriculture, this work introduces the Multi-Robot Dynamic Swarm Disablement problem, in which a team of robots is required to disable a swarm of agents (for example, locust agents) passing through an area while minimizing the cumulative time of the swarm members (equivalent to the cumulative damage they cause) in the area. Showing that the problem is hard even in naive settings, we turn to examine algorithms seeking to optimize the robots' performance against the swarm by exploiting the known movement pattern of the swarm agents. Motivated by the poor performance when a weak group of robots attempts to catch a large swarm of agents, whether it is a significant numerical minority or poor speed gaps, we suggest the use of blocking lines: the robots form lines that block the agents along their movement in the environment. We show by both theoretical analysis and rigorous empirical evaluation in different settings that these algorithms outperform common task-assignment-based algorithms, especially for limited robots versus a large swarm.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"27 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":"122440610","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}
Lennart Puck, Maximilian Schik, Tristan Schnell, Timothee Buettner, A. Roennau, R. Dillmann
{"title":"Ensemble Based Anomaly Detection for Legged Robots to Explore Unknown Environments","authors":"Lennart Puck, Maximilian Schik, Tristan Schnell, Timothee Buettner, A. Roennau, R. Dillmann","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981446","url":null,"abstract":"Exploring unknown environments, such as caves or planetary surfaces, requires a quick understanding of the surroundings. Beforehand, only aerial footage from satellites or images from previous missions might be available. The proposed ensemble based anomaly detection framework utilizes previously gained knowledge and incorporates it with insights gained during the mission. The modular system consists of different networks which are combined to determine anomalies in the current surroundings. By utilizing data from other missions, simulations or aerial photos, a precise anomaly detection can be achieved at the start of a mission. The system can further be improved by training new networks during the mission, which can be incorporated into the ensemble at runtime. This allows for synchronous execution of mission and training of models on a base station. The proposed system is tested and evaluated on an ANYmal C walking robot in different scenarios, however the approach is applicable for different kinds of mobile robots. The results show a clear improvement of ensembles compared to individual networks, while keeping a small memory footprint and low inference time on the mobile system.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"181 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":"122139652","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}
Jorge Blesa Gracia, Felix Leber, M. Aburaia, Wilfried Wöber
{"title":"A Configurable Skill Oriented Architecture Based on OPC UA","authors":"Jorge Blesa Gracia, Felix Leber, M. Aburaia, Wilfried Wöber","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982164","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last years, research done in automation and industrial robotics has established the foundations for skill-oriented systems based on the OPC UA standard. Nevertheless, utilizing these advances in other areas of robotics research can be challenging and time consuming. We present a framework aiming to reduce this entry threshold. Our solution is an open source, easy to configure tool based on OPC UA, that provides with a hardware agnostic, skill-oriented, event driven interface to systems. The framework allows integrating external hardware and software by means of plugins. It also provides a mechanism for endowing skills with hardware agnostic motion control. We demonstrate how our framework can be combined with state of the art approaches to control in a simulated assembly task with multiple robots, conveyors, actuators and sensors involved.","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":"117254695","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}
Dennis Melamed, Karnik Ram, Vivek Roy, Kris Kitani
{"title":"Learnable Spatio-Temporal Map Embeddings for Deep Inertial Localization","authors":"Dennis Melamed, Karnik Ram, Vivek Roy, Kris Kitani","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981092","url":null,"abstract":"Indoor localization systems often fuse inertial odometry with map information via hand-defined methods to reduce odometry drift, but such methods are sensitive to noise and struggle to generalize across odometry sources. To address the robustness problem in map utilization, we propose a data-driven prior on possible user locations in a map by combining learned spatial map embeddings and temporal odometry embeddings. Our prior learns to encode which map regions are feasible locations for a user more accurately than previous hand-defined methods. This prior leads to a 49% improvement in inertial-only localization accuracy when used in a particle filter. This result is significant, as it shows that our relative positioning method can match the performance of absolute positioning using bluetooth beacons. To show the gen-eralizability of our method, we also show similar improvements using wheel encoder odometry. Our code will be made publicly available†1project page: https://rebrand.ly/learned-map-prior.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 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":"129472869","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":"Motion Planning for HyTAQs: A Topology-guided Unified NMPC Approach","authors":"Tong Wu, Yimin Zhu, Lixian Zhang, Jianan Yang, Yihang Ding","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981106","url":null,"abstract":"In this study, a topology-guided unified nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) approach is proposed for autonomous navigation of a class of Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotors (HyTAQs) in unknown environments. The approach can fully exploit the hybrid terrestrial-aerial locomotion of the vehicle and as such ensure a high navigation efficiency. A unified terrestrial-aerial NMPC is first formulated with a type of complementarity constraints involving the hybrid dynamics, together with the collision avoidance constraints for safety. Further, a topological roadmap with both terrestrial and aerial paths is leveraged to guide the kinodynamic path searching and thus the unified NMPC. Then, a complete and distinctive navigation framework is established and validated on our self-developed HyTAQ. Compared with the existing unified terrestrial-aerial planning methods, ours takes the vehicle dynamics into account for the first attempt and achieves a more reasonable decision of modes switching. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"1 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":"129785952","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":"A Hybrid Primitive-Based Navigation Planner for the Wheeled-Legged Robot CENTAURO","authors":"A. Luca, L. Muratore, N. Tsagarakis","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981188","url":null,"abstract":"Wheeled-legged robots have the potential to navigate in cluttered and irregular scenarios by altering the locomotion modes to adapt to the terrain challenges and effectively reach targeted locations in unstructured spaces. To achieve this functionality, a hybrid locomotion planner is necessary. In this work we present a search-based planner, which explores a set of motion primitives and a 2.5D traversability map extracted from the environment to generate navigation plans for the hybrid mobility robot CENTAURO. The planner explores the map from the current robot position to the goal location requested by the user, considering the most appropriate composition and tuning of locomotion primitives to build up a feasible plan, which is then executed by the robot. The available primitives are prioritized and can be easily modified, added or removed through a configuration file. Our approach was evaluated both in simulation and on the real wheeled-legged robot CENTAURO, demonstrating traversing capabilities in cluttered environments with various obstacles.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"33 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":"128262110","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":"Autonomous Pipeline Tracking Using Bernoulli Filter for Unmanned Underwater Surveys","authors":"Vibhav Bharti, Sen Wang","doi":"10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981114","url":null,"abstract":"Inspection of subsea pipelines is crucial for avoiding any hazards and minimizing the risks to infrastructure and the environment. These inspections are achieved using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in favour of reduced operational costs. This work presents a vehicle agnostic approach for tracking subsea pipelines at close-range for autonomous guidance along the pipeline using an AUV. A multibeam echosounder is used as the primary tracking sensor augmented by fluxgate magnetometers that can track buried pipelines over short ranges until they are exposed again. A Bernoulli filter is proposed to efficiently track pipelines in presence of environmental clutter. Field experiments were carried out in a dock and at sea to evaluate the proposed system and the benefits of using a Bernoulli filter over a Kalman filter-based solution.","PeriodicalId":431373,"journal":{"name":"2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)","volume":"81 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":"128385612","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}