cross-posted from willowgarage.com
One of the challenges that robots like the PR2 face is knowing how to grasp an object. We have years of experience to help us determine what objects are and how to grasp them. We can tell the difference between a mug, and wine glass, and a bowl, and know that they each should be handled in a different way. For robots, the world is not as certain, but there are approaches they can take that let them interact in an uncertain world.
This summer, Peter Brook from the University of Washington wrote a grasp planning system which lets robots successfully pick up objects, even in cases where they make incorrect guesses about what the object is. This planner uses a probabilistic approach, where the robot uses potentially incomplete or noisy information from its sensors to make multiple guesses about the identity of the object it is looking at. Based on how confident the robot is in each of the possible explanations for the perceived data, it can select the grasps that are most likely to work on the underlying object.
First, the planner builds up a set of representations for the sensed data; some are based on the best guesses provided by ROS recognition algorithms, and some use the raw segmented 3D data. For each representation, it uses a grasp-planning algorithm to generate a list of possible grasps. It then combines the information from all these sources, sorting grasps based on their estimated probability of success across all the representations. For grasp planners running on known object models, it can also use pre-computed grasps that speed up execution time.
This probabilistic planner allows the PR2 robot to cope with uncertainty and reliably grasp a wider range of objects in unstructured environments. It is also integrated into the ROS object manipulation pipeline so that others can experiment and improve upon it. For more information, please see Peter's slides below (download PDF), or checkout the source code in the probabilistic_grasp_planner package on ROS.org.
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