Tactile localization of a power drill
Author Kaijen Hsiao
Video ID : 77
This video shows a Barrett WAM arm tactilely localizing and reorienting a power drill under high positional uncertainty. The goal is for the robot to robustly grasp the power drill such that the trigger can be activated. The robot tracks the distribution of possible object poses on the table over a 3-D grid (the belief space). It then selects between information-gathering, reorienting, and goal-seeking actions by modeling the problem as a POMDP (partially observable Markov decision process) and using receding-horizon, forward search through the belief space.
In the video, the inset window with the simulated robot is a visualization of the current belief state. The red spheres sit at the vertices of the object mesh placed at the most likely state, and the dark-blue box also shows the location of the most likely state. The purple box shows the location of the mean of the belief state, and the light-blue boxes show the variance of the belief state in the form of the locations of various states that are one standard deviation away from the mean in each of the three dimensions of uncertainty (x, y, and theta). The magenta spheres and arrows that appear when the robot touches the object show the contact locations and normals as reported by the sensors, and the cyan spheres that largely overlap the hand show where the robot controllers are trying to move the hand.