TechTalks from event: Technical session talks from ICRA 2012

Conference registration code to access these videos can be accessed by visiting this link: PaperPlaza. Step-by-step to access these videos are here: step-by-step process .
Why some of the videos are missing? If you had provided your consent form for your video to be published and still it is missing, please contact support@techtalks.tv

Sensing for manipulation

  • Using Depth and Appearance Features for Informed Robot Grasping of Highly Wrinkled Clothes Authors: Ramisa, Arnau; Alenyà, Guillem; Moreno-Noguer, Francesc; Torras, Carme
    Detecting grasping points is a key problem in cloth manipulation. Most current approaches follow a multiple re-grasp strategy for this purpose, in which clothes are sequentially grasped from different points until one of them yields to a desired configuration. In this paper, by contrast, we circumvent the need for multiple re-graspings by building a robust detector that identifies the grasping points, generally in one single step, even when clothes are highly wrinkled. In order to handle the large variability a deformed cloth may have, we build a Bag of Features based detector that combines appearance and 3D geometry features. An image is scanned using a sliding window with a linear classifier, and the candidate windows are refined using a non-linear SVM and a "grasp goodness" criterion to select the best grasping point. We demonstrate our approach detecting collars in deformed polo shirts, using a Kinect camera. Experimental results show a good performance of the proposed method not only in identifying the same trained textile object part under severe deformations and occlusions, but also the corresponding part in other clothes, exhibiting a degree of generalization.
  • Integrating surface-based hypotheses and manipulation for autonomous segmentation and learning of object representations Authors: Ude, Ales; Schiebener, David; Morimoto, Jun
    Learning about new objects that a robot sees for the first time is a difficult problem because it is not clear how to define the concept of object in general terms. In this paper we consider as objects those physical entities that are comprised of features which move consistently when the robot acts upon them. Among the possible actions that a robot could apply to a hypothetical object, pushing seems to be the most suitable one due to its relative simplicity and general applicability. We propose a methodology to generate and apply pushing actions to hypothetical objects. A probing push causes visual features to move, which enables the robot to either confirm or reject the initial hypothesis about existence of the object. Furthermore, the robot can discriminate the object from the background and accumulate visual features that are useful for training of state of the art statistical classifiers such as bag of features.
  • From Object Categories to Grasp Transfer Using Probabilistic Reasoning Authors: Madry, Marianna; Song, Dan; Kragic, Danica
    In this paper we address the problem of grasp generation and grasp transfer between objects using categorical knowledge. The system is built upon an i)~active scene segmentation module, able of generating object hypotheses and segmenting them from the background in real time, ii)~object categorization system using integration of 2D and 3D cues, and iii)~probabilistic grasp reasoning system. Individual object hypotheses are first generated, categorized and then used as the input to a grasp generation and transfer system that encodes task, object and action properties. The experimental evaluation compares individual 2D and 3D categorization approaches with the integrated system, and it demonstrates the usefulness of the categorization in task-based grasping and grasp transfer.
  • Voting-Based Pose Estimation for Robotic Assembly Using a 3D Sensor Authors: Choi, Changhyun; Taguchi, Yuichi; Tuzel, Oncel; Liu, Ming-Yu; Ramalingam, Srikumar
    We propose a voting-based pose estimation algorithm applicable to 3D sensors, which are fast replacing their 2D counterparts in many robotics, computer vision, and gaming applications. It was recently shown that a pair of oriented 3D points, which are points on the object surface with normals, in a voting framework enables fast and robust pose estimation. Although oriented surface points are discriminative for objects with sufficient curvature changes, they are not compact and discriminative enough for many industrial and real-world objects that are mostly planar. As edges play the key role in 2D registration, depth discontinuities are crucial in 3D. In this paper, we investigate and develop a family of pose estimation algorithms that better exploit this boundary information. In addition to oriented surface points, we use two other primitives: boundary points with directions and boundary line segments. Our experiments show that these carefully chosen primitives encode more information compactly and thereby provide higher accuracy for a wide class of industrial parts and enable faster computation. We demonstrate a practical robotic bin-picking system using the proposed algorithm and a 3D sensor.
  • Supervised Learning of Hidden and Non-Hidden 0-Order Affordances and Detection in Real Scenes Authors: Aldoma, Aitor; Tombari, Federico; Vincze, Markus
    The ability to perceive possible interactions with the environment is a key capability of task-guided robotic agents. An important subset of possible interactions depends solely on the objects of interest and their position and orientation in the scene. We call these object-based interactions $0$-order affordances and divide them among non-hidden and hidden whether the current configuration of an object in the scene renders its affordance directly usable or not. Conversely to other works, we propose that detecting affordances that are not directly perceivable increase the usefulness of robotic agents with manipulation capabilities, so that by appropriate manipulation they can modify the object configuration until the seeked affordance becomes available. In this paper we show how $0$-order affordances depending on the geometry of the objects and their pose can be learned using a supervised learning strategy on 3D mesh representations of the objects allowing the use of the whole object geometry. Moreover, we show how the learned affordances can be detected in real scenes obtained with a low-cost depth sensor like the Microsoft Kinect through object recognition and 6D0F pose estimation and present results for both learning on meshes and detection on real scenes to demonstrate the practical application of the presented approach.
  • Estimating Object Grasp Sliding Via Pressure Array Sensing Authors: Alcazar, Javier Adolfo; Barajas, Leandro
    Advances in design and fabrication technologies are enabling the production and commercialization of sensor-rich robotic hands with skin-like sensor arrays. Robotic skin is poised to become a crucial interface between the robot embodied intelligence and the external world. The need to fuse and make sense out of data extracted from skin-like sensors is readily apparent. This paper presents a real-time sensor fusion algorithm that can be used to accurately estimate object position, translation and rotation during grasping. When an object being grasped moves across the sensor array, it creates a sliding sensation; the spatial-temporal sensations are estimated by computing localized slid vectors using an optical flow approach. These results were benchmarked against an L-inf Norm approach using a nominal known object trajectory generated by sliding and rotating an object over the sensor array using a second, high accuracy, industrial robot. Rotation and slid estimation can later be used to improve grasping quality and dexterity