News/Research

New Papers from Ken Goldberg at ICRA 2019

03 Jul, 2019

New Papers from Ken Goldberg at ICRA 2019

The IEEE 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is a flagship event and the premier international forum for robotics researchers to present and discuss their work. This year, it took place May 20-24, 2019 in Montreal, Canada. Our own Ken Goldberg was the co-author of several papers presented at the event!

A Fog Robotics Approach to Deep Robot Learning: Application to Object Recognition and Grasp Planning in Surface Decluttering

Ajay Kumar Tanwani, Nitesh Mor, John Kubiatowicz, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg

The growing demand of industrial, automotive and service robots presents a challenge to the centralized Cloud Robotics model in terms of privacy, security, latency, bandwidth, and reliability. In this paper, we present a `Fog Robotics' approach to deep robot learning that distributes compute, storage and networking resources between the Cloud and the Edge in a federated manner. Deep models are trained on non-private (public) synthetic images in the Cloud; the models are adapted to the private real images of the environment at the Edge within a trusted network and subsequently, deployed as a service for low-latency and secure inference/prediction for other robots in the network. We apply this approach to surface decluttering, where a mobile robot picks and sorts objects from a cluttered floor by learning a deep object recognition and a grasp planning model. Experiments suggest that Fog Robotics can improve performance by sim-to-real domain adaptation in comparison to exclusively using Cloud or Edge resources, while reducing the inference cycle time by 4\times to successfully declutter 86% of objects over 213 attempts.

See more here!

Mechanical Search: Multi-Step Retrieval of a Target Object Occluded by Clutter

Michael Danielczuk, Andrey Kurenkov, Ashwin Balakrishna, Matthew Matl, David Wang, Roberto Martín-Martín, Animesh Garg, Silvio Savarese, Ken Goldberg

When operating in unstructured environments such as warehouses, homes, and retail centers, robots are frequently required to interactively search for and retrieve specific objects from cluttered bins, shelves, or tables. Mechanical Search describes the class of tasks where the goal is to locate and extract a known target object. In this paper, we formalize Mechanical Search and study a version where distractor objects are heaped over the target object in a bin. The robot uses an RGBD perception system and control policies to iteratively select, parameterize, and perform one of 3 actions -- push, suction, grasp -- until the target object is extracted, or either a time limit is exceeded, or no high confidence push or grasp is available. We present a study of 5 algorithmic policies for mechanical search, with 15,000 simulated trials and 300 physical trials for heaps ranging from 10 to 20 objects. Results suggest that success can be achieved in this long-horizon task with algorithmic policies in over 95% of instances and that the number of actions required scales approximately linearly with the size of the heap. Code and supplementary material can be found at this http URL .

See more here!

Read more about the program here!