International Journal of Robotics Research最新文献

{"title":"Automatic encoding and repair of reactive high-level tasks with learned abstract representations","authors":"Adam Pacheck, Steven D. James, G. Konidaris, H. Kress-Gazit","doi":"10.1177/02783649231167207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231167207","url":null,"abstract":"We present a framework for the automatic encoding and repair of high-level tasks. Given a set of skills a robot can perform, our approach first abstracts sensor data into symbols and then automatically encodes the robot’s capabilities in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). Using this encoding, a user can specify reactive high-level tasks, for which we can automatically synthesize a strategy that executes on the robot, if the task is feasible. If a task is not feasible given the robot’s capabilities, we present two methods, one enumeration-based and one synthesis-based, for automatically suggesting additional skills for the robot or modifications to existing skills that would make the task feasible. We demonstrate our framework on a Baxter robot manipulating blocks on a table, a Baxter robot manipulating plates on a table, and a Kinova arm manipulating vials, with multiple sensor modalities, including raw images.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"42 1","pages":"263 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49515007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Magnetic concentric tube robots: Introduction and analysis","authors":"Quentin Peyron, Q. Boehler, P. Rougeot, Pierre Roux, B. Nelson, N. Andreff, K. Rabenorosoa, P. Renaud","doi":"10.1177/02783649211071113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649211071113","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we propose a new type of continuum robot, referred to as a magnetic concentric tube robot (M-CTR), for performing minimally invasive surgery in narrow and difficult-to-access areas. The robot combines concentric tubes and magnetic actuation to benefit from the ‘follow the leader’ behaviour, the dexterity and stability of existing robots, while targeting millimetre-sized external diameters. These three kinematic properties are assessed through numerical and experimental studies performed on a prototype of a M-CTR. They are performed with general forward and inverse kineto-static models of the robot, continuation and bifurcation analysis, and a specific experimental setup. The prototype presents unique capabilities in terms of deployment and active stability management, while its dexterity in terms of tip orientability is also among the best reported for other robots at its scale.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"41 1","pages":"418 - 440"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43318229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sequential contact-based adaptive grasping for robotic hands","authors":"G. J. Pollayil, M. J. Pollayil, M. Catalano, A. Bicchi, G. Grioli","doi":"10.1177/02783649221081154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649221081154","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a novel type of grasping strategy that draws inspiration from the role of touch and the importance of wrist motions in human grasping. The proposed algorithm, which we call Sequential Contact-based Adaptive Grasping, can be used to reactively modify a given grasp plan according to contacts arising between the hand and the object. This technique, based on a systematic constraint categorization and an iterative task inversion procedure, is shown to lead to synchronized motions of the fingers and the wrist, as it can be observed in humans, and to increase grasp success rate by substantially mitigating the relevant problems of object slippage during hand closure and of uncertainties caused by the environment and by the perception system. After describing the grasping problem in its quasi-static aspects, the algorithm is derived and discussed with some simple simulations. The proposed method is general as it can be applied to different kinds of robotic hands. It refines a priori defined grasp plans and significantly reduces their accuracy requirements by relying only on a forward kinematic model and elementary contact information. The efficacy of our approach is confirmed by experimental results of tests performed on a collaborative robot manipulator equipped with a state-of-the-art underactuated soft hand.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"41 1","pages":"543 - 570"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46066998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"RadarSLAM: A robust simultaneous localization and mapping system for all weather conditions","authors":"Ziyang Hong, Y. Pétillot, Andrew M. Wallace, Sen Wang","doi":"10.1177/02783649221080483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649221080483","url":null,"abstract":"A Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system must be robust to support long-term mobile vehicle and robot applications. However, camera and LiDAR based SLAM systems can be fragile when facing challenging illumination or weather conditions which degrade the utility of imagery and point cloud data. Radar, whose operating electromagnetic spectrum is less affected by environmental changes, is promising although its distinct sensor model and noise characteristics bring open challenges when being exploited for SLAM. This paper studies the use of a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave radar for SLAM in large-scale outdoor environments. We propose a full radar SLAM system, including a novel radar motion estimation algorithm that leverages radar geometry for reliable feature tracking. It also optimally compensates motion distortion and estimates pose by joint optimization. Its loop closure component is designed to be simple yet efficient for radar imagery by capturing and exploiting structural information of the surrounding environment. Extensive experiments on three public radar datasets, ranging from city streets and residential areas to countryside and highways, show competitive accuracy and reliability performance of the proposed radar SLAM system compared to the state-of-the-art LiDAR, vision and radar methods. The results show that our system is technically viable in achieving reliable SLAM in extreme weather conditions on the RADIATE Dataset, for example, heavy snow and dense fog, demonstrating the promising potential of using radar for all-weather localization and mapping.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"41 1","pages":"519 - 542"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47655744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Planning to chronicle: Optimal policies for narrative observation of unpredictable events","authors":"Hazhar Rahmani, Dylan A. Shell, J. O’Kane","doi":"10.1177/02783649211069154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649211069154","url":null,"abstract":"One important class of applications entails a robot scrutinizing, monitoring, or recording the evolution of an uncertain time-extended process. This sort of situation leads to an interesting family of active perception problems that can be cast as planning problems in which the robot is limited in what it sees and must, thus, choose what to pay attention to. The distinguishing characteristic of this setting is that the robot has influence over what it captures via its sensors, but exercises no causal authority over the process evolving in the world. As such, the robot’s objective is to observe the underlying process and to produce a “chronicle” of occurrent events, subject to a goal specification of the sorts of event sequences that may be of interest. This paper examines variants of such problems in which the robot aims to collect sets of observations to meet a rich specification of their sequential structure. We study this class of problems by modeling a stochastic process via a variant of a hidden Markov model and specify the event sequences of interest as a regular language, developing a vocabulary of “mutators” that enable sophisticated requirements to be expressed. Under different suppositions on the information gleaned about the event model, we formulate and solve different planning problems. The core underlying idea is the construction of a product between the event model and a specification automaton. Using this product, we compute a policy that minimizes the expected number of steps to reach a goal state. We introduce a general algorithm for this problem as well as several more efficient algorithms for important special cases. The paper reports and compares performance metrics by drawing on some small case studies analyzed in depth via simulation. Specifically, we study the effect of the robot’s observation model on the average time required for the robot to record a desired story. We also compare our algorithm with a baseline greedy algorithm, showing that our algorithm outperforms the greedy algorithm in terms of the average time to record a desired story. In addition, experiments show that the algorithms tailored to specialized variants of the problem are rather more efficient than the general algorithm.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"42 1","pages":"412 - 432"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48632765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Boreas: A multi-season autonomous driving dataset","authors":"Keenan Burnett, David J. Yoon, Yuchen Wu, A. Z. Li, Haowei Zhang, Shichen Lu, Jingxing Qian, Wei-Kang Tseng, A. Lambert, K. Leung, Angela P. Schoellig, T. Barfoot","doi":"10.1177/02783649231160195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231160195","url":null,"abstract":"The Boreas dataset was collected by driving a repeated route over the course of 1 year, resulting in stark seasonal variations and adverse weather conditions such as rain and falling snow. In total, the Boreas dataset includes over 350 km of driving data featuring a 128-channel Velodyne Alpha-Prime lidar, a 360° Navtech CIR304-H scanning radar, a 5MP FLIR Blackfly S camera, and centimetre-accurate post-processed ground truth poses. Our dataset will support live leaderboards for odometry, metric localization, and 3D object detection. The dataset and development kit are available at boreas.utias.utoronto.ca.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"42 1","pages":"33 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48399630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An efficient, modular controller for flapping flight composing model-based and model-free components","authors":"Avik De, Rebecca McGill, R. Wood","doi":"10.1177/02783649211063225","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649211063225","url":null,"abstract":"We present a controller that combines model-based methods with model-free data-driven methods hierarchically, utilizing the predictive power of template models with the strengths of model-free methods to account for model error, such as due to manufacturing variability in the RoboBee, a 100 mg flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV). Using a large suite of numerical trials, we show that the model-predictive high-level component of the proposed controller is more performant, easier to tune, and able to stabilize more dynamic tasks than a baseline reactive controller, while the data-driven inverse dynamics controller is able to better compensate for biases arising from manufacturing variability. At the same time, the formulated controller is very computationally efficient, with the MPC implemented at 5 KHz on a Simulink embedded target, via which we empirically demonstrate controlled hovering on a RoboBee.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"41 1","pages":"441 - 457"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41639077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"BenchBot environments for active robotics (BEAR): Simulated data for active scene understanding research","authors":"David Hall, Ben Talbot, S. Bista, Haoyang Zhang, Rohan Smith, Feras Dayoub, Niko Sünderhauf","doi":"10.1177/02783649211069404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649211069404","url":null,"abstract":"We present a platform to foster research in active scene understanding, consisting of high-fidelity simulated environments and a simple yet powerful API that controls a mobile robot in simulation and reality. In contrast to static, pre-recorded datasets that focus on the perception aspect of scene understanding, agency is a top priority in our work. We provide three levels of robot agency, allowing users to control a robot at varying levels of difficulty and realism. While the most basic level provides pre-defined trajectories and ground-truth localisation, the more realistic levels allow us to evaluate integrated behaviours comprising perception, navigation, exploration and SLAM. In contrast to existing simulation environments, we focus on robust scene understanding research using our environment interface (BenchBot) that provides a simple API for seamless transition between the simulated environments and real robotic platforms. We believe this scaffolded design is an effective approach to bridge the gap between classical static datasets without any agency and the unique challenges of robotic evaluation in reality. Our BenchBot Environments for Active Robotics (BEAR) consist of 25 indoor environments under day and night lighting conditions, a total of 1443 objects to be identified and mapped, and ground-truth 3D bounding boxes for use in evaluation. BEAR website: https://qcr.github.io/dataset/benchbot-bear-data/.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"41 1","pages":"259 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47712061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AURORA, a multi-sensor dataset for robotic ocean exploration","authors":"Marco Bernardi, Brett Hosking, C. Petrioli, B. Bett, Daniel Jones, V. Huvenne, Rachel Marlow, M. Furlong, S. McPhail, A. Munafò","doi":"10.1177/02783649221078612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649221078612","url":null,"abstract":"The current maturity of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has made their deployment practical and cost-effective, such that many scientific, industrial and military applications now include AUV operations. However, the logistical difficulties and high costs of operating at sea are still critical limiting factors in further technology development, the benchmarking of new techniques and the reproducibility of research results. To overcome this problem, this paper presents a freely available dataset suitable to test control, navigation, sensor processing algorithms and others tasks. This dataset combines AUV navigation data, sidescan sonar, multibeam echosounder data and seafloor camera image data, and associated sensor acquisition metadata to provide a detailed characterisation of surveys carried out by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in the Greater Haig Fras Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) of the U.K in 2015.","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"41 1","pages":"461 - 469"},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65097872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fundamental limits for sensor-based robot control","authors":"Anirudha Majumdar, Zhi-Yong Mei, Vincent Pacelli","doi":"10.1177/02783649231190947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02783649231190947","url":null,"abstract":"Our goal is to develop theory and algorithms for establishing fundamental limits on performance imposed by a robot’s sensors for a given task. In order to achieve this, we define a quantity that captures the amount of task-relevant information provided by a sensor. Using a novel version of the generalized Fano's inequality from information theory, we demonstrate that this quantity provides an upper bound on the highest achievable expected reward for one-step decision-making tasks. We then extend this bound to multi-step problems via a dynamic programming approach. We present algorithms for numerically computing the resulting bounds, and demonstrate our approach on three examples: (i) the lava problem from the literature on partially observable Markov decision processes, (ii) an example with continuous state and observation spaces corresponding to a robot catching a freely-falling object, and (iii) obstacle avoidance using a depth sensor with non-Gaussian noise. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to establish strong limits on achievable performance for these problems by comparing our upper bounds with achievable lower bounds (computed by synthesizing or learning concrete control policies).","PeriodicalId":54942,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Robotics Research","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":9.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47184008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}