Related papers: Configuration Lattices for Planar Contact Manipula…
Robots often face challenges in domestic environments where visual feedback is ineffective, such as retrieving objects obstructed by occlusions or finding a light switch in the dark. In these cases, utilizing contacts to localize the target…
Manipulating unknown objects in a cluttered environment is difficult because segmentation of the scene into objects, that is, object composition is uncertain. Due to this uncertainty, earlier work has concentrated on either identifying the…
This paper investigates manipulation of multiple unknown objects in a crowded environment. Because of incomplete knowledge due to unknown objects and occlusions in visual observations, object observations are imperfect and action success is…
Planning under uncertainty is critical to robotics. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a mathematical framework for such planning problems. It is powerful due to its careful quantification of the non-deterministic…
Noisy sensing, imperfect control, and environment changes are defining characteristics of many real-world robot tasks. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled mathematical framework for modeling and…
Autonomous agents are limited in their ability to observe the world state. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) formally model the problem of planning under world state uncertainty, but POMDPs with continuous actions and…
We address the problem of controlling a mobile robot to explore a partially known environment. The robot's objective is the maximization of the amount of information collected about the environment. We formulate the problem as a partially…
As general purpose robots become more capable, pre-programming of all tasks at the factory will become less practical. We would like for non-technical human owners to be able to communicate, through interaction with their robot, the details…
In robotic insertion tasks where the uncertainty exceeds the allowable tolerance, a good search strategy is essential for successful insertion and significantly influences efficiency. The commonly used blind search method is time-consuming…
Simultaneous localization and Planning (SLAP) is a crucial ability for an autonomous robot operating under uncertainty. In its most general form, SLAP induces a continuous POMDP (partially-observable Markov decision process), which needs to…
Robots operating in real-world environments must reason about possible outcomes of stochastic actions and make decisions based on partial observations of the true world state. A major challenge for making accurate and robust action…
We present an approach to robotic manipulation of unknown objects through regulation of the object's contact configuration: the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the object, robot, and environment. A contact configuration…
When mobile robots maneuver near people, they run the risk of rudely blocking their paths; but not all people behave the same around robots. People that have not noticed the robot are the most difficult to predict. This paper investigates…
Representing and reasoning about uncertainty is crucial for autonomous agents acting in partially observable environments with noisy sensors. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) serve as a general framework for…
Searching for objects in cluttered environments requires selecting efficient viewpoints and manipulation actions to remove occlusions and reduce uncertainty in object locations, shapes, and categories. In this work, we address the problem…
In this work, we build on our method for manipulating unknown objects via contact configuration regulation: the estimation and control of the location, geometry, and mode of all contacts between the robot, object, and environment. We…
Planning under partial obervability is essential for autonomous robots. A principled way to address such planning problems is the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Although solving POMDPs is computationally intractable,…
We describe a probabilistic framework for synthesizing control policies for general multi-robot systems, given environment and sensor models and a cost function. Decentralized, partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are…
The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled general model for planning under uncertainty. However, solving a general POMDP is computationally intractable in the worst case. This paper introduces…
The main goal in task planning is to build a sequence of actions that takes an agent from an initial state to a goal state. In robotics, this is particularly difficult because actions usually have several possible results, and sensors are…