Robot warehouse automation has attracted significant interest in recent years, perhaps most visibly in the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC). A fully autonomous warehouse pick-and-place system requires robust vision that reliably recognizes and locates objects amid cluttered environments, self-occlusions, sensor noise, and a large variety of objects. In this paper we present an approach that leverages multi-view RGB-D data and self-supervised, data-driven learning to overcome those difficulties. The approach was part of the MIT-Princeton Team system that took 3rd- and 4th- place in the stowing and picking tasks, respectively at APC 2016. In the proposed approach, we segment and label multiple views of a scene with a fully convolutional neural network, and then fit pre-scanned 3D object models to the resulting segmentation to get the 6D object pose. Training a deep neural network for segmentation typically requires a large amount of training data. We propose a self-supervised method to generate a large labeled dataset without tedious manual segmentation. We demonstrate that our system can reliably estimate the 6D pose of objects under a variety of scenarios. All code, data, and benchmarks are available at this http URL
Pose estimation. There are two primary approaches for estimating the 6D pose of an object. The first aligns 3D CAD models to 3D point clouds with algorithms such as iterative closest point @cite_1 . The second uses more elaborated local descriptors such as SIFT keypoints @cite_7 for color data or 3DMatch @cite_3 for 3D data. The former approach is mainly used with depth-only sensors, in scenarios where lighting changes significantly, or on textureless objects. Highly textured and rigid objects, on the other hand, benefit from local descriptors. Existing frameworks such as LINEMOD @cite_9 or MOPED @cite_20 work well under certain assumptions such as objects sitting on a table top with good illumination, but underperform when confronted with the limited visibility, shadows, and clutter imposed by the APC scenario @cite_19 .
@cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_19 @cite_20
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We present a method for detecting 3D objects using multi-modalities. While it is generic, we demonstrate it on the combination of an image and a dense depth map which give complementary object information. It works in real-time, under heavy clutter, does not require a time consuming training stage, and can handle untextured objects. It is based on an efficient representation of templates that capture the different modalities, and we show in many experiments on commodity hardware that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on single modalities. The authors describe a general-purpose, representation-independent method for the accurate and computationally efficient registration of 3-D shapes including free-form curves and surfaces. The method handles the full six degrees of freedom and is based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, which requires only a procedure to find the closest point on a geometric entity to a given point. The ICP algorithm always converges monotonically to the nearest local minimum of a mean-square distance metric, and the rate of convergence is rapid during the first few iterations. Therefore, given an adequate set of initial rotations and translations for a particular class of objects with a certain level of 'shape complexity', one can globally minimize the mean-square distance metric over all six degrees of freedom by testing each initial registration. One important application of this method is to register sensed data from unfixtured rigid objects with an ideal geometric model, prior to shape inspection. Experimental results show the capabilities of the registration algorithm on point sets, curves, and surfaces. > This paper presents an overview of the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge along with a summary of a survey conducted among the 26 participating teams. The challenge goal was to design an autonomous robot to pick items from a warehouse shelf. This task is currently performed by human workers, and there is hope that robots can someday help increase efficiency and throughput while lowering cost. We report on a 28-question survey posed to the teams to learn about each team’s background, mechanism design, perception apparatus, planning, and control approach. We identify trends in this data, correlate it with each team’s success in the competition, and discuss observations and lessons learned based on survey results and the authors’ personal experiences during the challenge. Note to Practitioners —Perception, motion planning, grasping, and robotic system engineering have reached a level of maturity that makes it possible to explore automating simple warehouse tasks in semistructured environments that involve high-mix, low-volume picking applications. This survey summarizes lessons learned from the first Amazon Picking Challenge, highlighting mechanism design, perception, and motion planning algorithms, as well as software engineering practices that were most successful in solving a simplified order fulfillment task. While the choice of mechanism mostly affects execution speed, the competition demonstrated the systems challenges of robotics and illustrated the importance of combining reactive control with deliberative planning. We present MOPED, a framework for Multiple Object Pose Estimation and Detection that seamlessly integrates single-image and multi-image object recognition and pose estimation in one optimized, robust, and scalable framework. We address two main challenges in computer vision for robotics: robust performance in complex scenes, and low latency for real-time operation. We achieve robust performance with Iterative Clustering Estimation (ICE), a novel algorithm that iteratively combines feature clustering with robust pose estimation. Feature clustering quickly partitions the scene and produces object hypotheses. The hypotheses are used to further refine the feature clusters, and the two steps iterate until convergence. ICE is easy to parallelize, and easily integrates single- and multi-camera object recognition and pose estimation. We also introduce a novel object hypothesis scoring function based on M-estimator theory, and a novel pose clustering algorithm that robustly handles recognition outliers. We achieve scalability and low latency with an improved feature matching algorithm for large databases, a GPU CPU hybrid architecture that exploits parallelism at all levels, and an optimized resource scheduler. We provide extensive experimental results demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in terms of recognition, scalability, and latency in real-world robotic applications.