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In this paper, we address the problem of Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO): a practical extension to navigation for humanoids and other dexterous mobile robots. The robot is permitted to reconfigure the environment by moving obstacles and clearing free space for a path. This paper presents a resolution complete planner for a subclass of NAMO problems. Our planner takes advantage of the navigational structure through state-space decomposition and heuristic search. The planning complexity is reduced to the difficulty of the specific navigation task, rather than the dimensionality of the multi-object domain. We demonstrate real-time results for spaces that contain large numbers of movable obstacles. We also present a practical framework for single-agent search that can be used in algorithmic reasoning about this domain.

Aiming at building versatile humanoid systems, we present in this paper the real-time implementation of behaviors which integrate walking and vision to achieve general functionalities. The paper describes how real-time — or high-bandwidth — cognitive processes can be obtained by combining vision with walking. The central point of our methodology is to use appropriate models to reduce the complexity of the search space. We will describe the models introduced in the different blocks of the system and their relationships: walking pattern, self-localization and map building, real-time reactive vision behaviors, and planning.

We present an approach to motion planning for humanoid robots that aims to ensure reliable execution by augmenting the planning process to reason about the robot's ability to successfully perceive its environment during operation. By efficiently simulating the robot's perception system during search, our planner utilizes a perceptive capability metric that quantifies the 'sensability' of the environment in each state given the task to be accomplished. We have applied our method to the problem of planning robust autonomous grasping motions and walking sequences as performed by an HRP-2 humanoid. A fast GPU-accelerated 3D tracker is used for perception, with a grasp planner and footstep planner incorporating reasoning about the robot's perceptive capability. Experimental results show that considering information about the predicted perceptive capability ensures that sensing remains operational throughout the grasping or walking sequence and yields higher task success rates than perception-unaware planning.

We explore how to represent, plan and learn robot pouring. This is a case study of a complex task that has many variations and involves manipulating non-rigid materials such as liquids and granular substances. Variations of pouring we consider are the type of pouring (such as pouring into a glass or spreading a sauce on an object), material, container shapes, initial poses of containers and target amounts. The robot learns to select appropriate behaviors from a library of skills, such as tipping, shaking and tapping, to pour a range of materials from a variety of containers. The robot also learns to select behavioral parameters. Planning methods are used to adapt skills for some variations such as initial poses of containers. We show using simulation and experiments on a PR2 robot that our pouring behavior model is able to plan and learn to handle a wide variety of pouring tasks. This case study is a step towards enabling humanoid robots to perform tasks of daily living.

This work develops and implements a multi-agent time-based path-planning method using A*. The purpose of this work is to create methods in which multi-agent systems can coordinate actions and complete them at the same time. We utilized A* with constraints defined by a dynamic model of each agent. The model for each agent is updated during each time step and the resulting control is determined. This results in a translational path that each of the agents is physically capable of completing in synchrony. The resulting path is given to the agents as a sequence of waypoints. Periodic updates of the path are calculated, utilizing real-world position and velocity information, as the agents complete the task to account for external disturbances. Our methodology is tested in a dynamic simulation environment as well as on real-world lighter-than-air robotic agents.

Cognitive robots have started to find their way into manufacturing halls. However, the full potential of these robots can only be exploited through an integration into the automation pyramid so that the system is able to communicate with the manufacturing execution system (MES). Integrating the robot with the MES allows the robot to get access to manufacturing environment and process data so that it can perform its task without human intervention. This paper describe the mobile robotic manipulator developed in the EU project STAMINA, its has been integrated with an existing MES and its application in a kitting task from the automotive industry.