A Distance-Geometric Method for Recovering Robot Joint Angles From an RGB Image
Autonomous manipulation systems operating in domains where human intervention is difficult or impossible (e.g., underwater, extraterrestrial or hazardous environments) require a high degree of robustness to sensing and communication failures. Crucially, motion planning and control algorithms require a stream of accurate joint angle data provided by joint encoders, the failure of which may result in an unrecoverable loss of functionality. In this paper, we present a novel method for retrieving the joint angles of a robot manipulator using only a single RGB image of its current configuration, opening up an avenue for recovering system functionality when conventional proprioceptive sensing is unavailable. Our approach, based on a distance-geometric representation of the configuration space, exploits the knowledge of a robot's kinematic model with the goal of training a shallow neural network that performs a 2D-to-3D regression of distances associated with detected structural keypoints. It is shown that the resulting Euclidean distance matrix uniquely corresponds to the observed configuration, where joint angles can be recovered via multidimensional scaling and a simple inverse kinematics procedure. We evaluate the performance of our approach on real RGB images of a Franka Emika Panda manipulator, showing that the proposed method is efficient and exhibits solid generalization ability. Furthermore, we show that our method can be easily combined with a dense refinement technique to obtain superior results.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Motion PlanningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Geometric Invariants for Sparse Unknown View Tomography
In this paper, we study a 2D tomography problem for point source models with random unknown view angles. Rather than recovering the projection angles, we reconstruct the model through a set of rotation-invariant features…
Nothing But Geometric Constraints: A Model-Free Method for Articulated Object Pose Estimation
We propose an unsupervised vision-based system to estimate the joint configurations of the robot arm from a sequence of RGB or RGB-D images without knowing the model a priori, and then adapt it to the task of category-in…
Optical Flow EstimationPose EstimationOptimal control of a swimming robot based on Purcell's microswimmer model
Purcell's swimmer is a well-known planar model of a swimming microorganism, governed by low Reynolds number hydrodynamics, which is comprised of three rigid links connected by actuated rotary joints. This model has been …
Imitation of Arm Gestures by the Semi-Humanoid Robot NICO
Seamless human-robot interaction (HRI) requires a number of perceptual and motor abilities from the robot, one of them being the imitation of human gestures. Humanoid robots have an advantage in HRI thanks to their anthr…
Autonomous Aerial Manipulation at Arbitrary Pose in SE(3) with Robust Control and Whole-body Planning
Aerial manipulators based on conventional multirotors can conduct manipulation only in small roll and pitch angles due to the underactuatedness of the multirotor base. If the multirotor base is capable of hovering at arb…
Motion Planning