15 accepted papers
Can objects that are not visible in an image---but are in the vicinity of the camera---be detected? This study introduces the novel tasks of 2D, 2.5D and 3D unobserved object detection for predicting the location of nearby objects that are occluded or lie outside the image frame. We adapt several s…
Hardness of modeling a planning domain is a major obstacle for making automated planning techniques accessible. We developed a tool that helps modelers correct domains based on available information such as the known feasibility or infeasibility of certain plans. Designing model repair strategies th…
Connection radius in asymptotically optimal motion planning algorithms is of interest to both understand the theoretical properties of these algorithms, as well as to ensure practical performance by estimating lower bounds. The smaller the connection radius, the sparser the data structures construct…
This paper explores general multi-robot task and motion planning, where multiple robots in close proximity manipulate objects while satisfying constraints and a given goal. In particular, we formulate the plan refinement problem—which, given a task plan, finds valid assignments of variables correspo…
Motion planning is a fundamental capability in robotics applications. Real-world scenarios can introduce uncertainty to the motion planning problem. In this work we study environment uncertainty in general high-dimensional problems wherein the choice of appropriate metrics and formulations are shown…
Robotic deployments in human environments have motivated the need for autonomous systems to be able to interact with humans and solve tasks effectively. Human demonstrations of tasks can be used to infer underlying task specifications, commonly modeled with temporal logic. State-of-the-art methods h…
Many methods that solve robot planning problems, such as task and motion planners, employ discrete symbolic search to find sequences of valid symbolic actions that are grounded with motion planning. Much of the efficacy of these planners lies in this grounding-bad placement and grasp choices can lea…
Robotics and automation are poised to change the landscape of home and work in the near future. Robots are adept at deliberately moving, sensing, and interacting with their environments. The pervasive use of robotics promises societal and economic payoffs due to its capabilities—conversely, the capa…
Future robotic deployments will require robots to be able to repeatedly solve a variety of tasks in application domains. Task and motion planning addresses complex robotic problems that combine discrete reasoning over states and actions and geometric interactions during action executions. Moving bey…
Many manipulation tasks combine high-level discrete planning over actions with low-level motion planning over continuous robot motions. Task and motion planning (TMP) provides a powerful general framework to combine discrete and geometric reasoning, and solvers have been previously proposed for sing…
We present a framework for planning complex motor actions such as pouring or scooping from arbitrary start states in cluttered real-world scenes. Traditional approaches to such tasks use dynamic motion primitives (DMPs) learned from human demonstrations. We enhance a recently proposed state-of-the-a…
Using sampling to estimate the connectivity of high-dimensional configuration spaces has been the theoretical underpinning for effective sampling-based motion planners. Typical strategies either build a roadmap, or a tree as the underlying search structure that connects sampled configurations, with…
Recent progress in robotic manipulation has dealt with the case of previously unknown objects in the context of relatively simple tasks, such as bin-picking. Existing methods for more constrained problems, however, such as deliberate placement in a tight region, depend more critically on shape infor
Advances in sensor technologies, object detection algorithms, planning frameworks and hardware designs have motivated the deployment of robots in warehouse automation. A variety of such applications, like order fulfillment or packing tasks, require picking objects from unstructured piles and careful…
An important logistics application of robotics involves manipulators that pick-and-place objects placed in warehouse shelves. A critical aspect of this task corresponds to detecting the pose of a known object in the shelf using visual data. Solving this problem can be assisted by the use of an RGBD