Events Calendar

PhD Defense - Megha Gupta

Ph.D. Candidate: Megha Gupta

Committee members:
Gaurav Sukhatme (chair)
Stefan Schaal
Bhaskar Krishnamachari (outside member)

Time: May 7, 2014, 10 am
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall (RTH), room 422

Title: Intelligent Robotic Manipulation of Cluttered Environments

Abstract:

Robotic household assistants of the future will need to understand their environment in real-time with high accuracy. There are two problems that make this challenging for robots. First, human environments are typically cluttered, containing a lot of objects of all kinds, shapes and sizes, in close proximity. This introduces errors in the robot's perception and manipulation. Second, human environments are highly varied. Improving a robot's perceptual abilities can tackle these challenge only partially. A robot's ability to manipulate its environment can help in enabling and overcoming the limits of perception.

We test this idea in the context of sorting and searching in cluttered, bounded, and partially observable environments. The inherent uncertainty in the world state forces the robot to adopt an observe-plan-act strategy where perception, planning, and execution are interleaved. Since execution of an action may result in revealing information about the world that was unknown hitherto, a new plan needs to be generated as a consequence of the robots actions . Since manipulation is typically expensive on a robot, our goal is to reduce the number of object manipulations required to complete the desired task.

We present a robust pipeline that combines manipulation-aided perception and grasping in the context of sorting objects on a tabletop. We present an adaptive look-ahead algorithm for exploration by prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation of the objects it contains. Finally, we add contextual structure to the world in the form of object-object co-occurrence relations and present an algorithm that uses context to guide the object search. We evaluate our planners through simulations and real-world experiments on the PR2 robot and show that purposeful manipulation of clutter to aid perception becomes increasingly useful (and essential) as the clutter in the environment increases.

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 422

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Lizsl De Leon