Robots that autonomously manipulate objects within warehouses have the potential to shorten the package delivery time and improve the efficiency of the e-commerce industry. In this paper, we present a robotic system that is capable of both picking and placing general objects in warehouse scenarios. Given a target object, the robot autonomously detects it from a shelf or a table and estimates its full 6D pose. With this pose information, the robot picks the object using its gripper, and then places it into a container or at a specified location. We describe our pick-and-place system in detail while highlighting our design principles for the warehouse settings, including the perception method that leverages knowledge about its workspace, three grippers designed to handle a large variety of different objects in terms of shape, weight and material, and grasp planning in cluttered scenarios. We also present extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our picking system and demonstrate that the robot is competent to accomplish various tasks in warehouse settings, such as picking a target item from a tight space, grasping different objects from the shelf, and performing pick-and-place tasks on the table.
The perception problem in the warehouse settings is an example of the general object detection, segmentation and pose estimation, which is widely researched in computer vision. But this perception problem also has its own characteristics, i.e., it typically uses multi-modal vision (not only the RGB images) and tightly couples with the following grasping movement @cite_26 . To accurately manipulate the target object, our perception methods need to output the object's full 6D pose. Traditional computer vision methods usually output bounding boxes with highly likely object locations on the input RGB images. These representations are difficult to use in warehouse picking context as the bounding boxes without depth information are not that useful for grasping and manipulating. Recently, there are some work on creating RGB-D datasets @cite_8 @cite_4 for improving object detection and pose estimation in warehouse environments. Specially, the multi-class segmentation used in @cite_21 helps the team achieve the winning entry to the APC 2015. This method gives shape information as output to indicate the location of the target object. Although shape information is sufficient to pick items in some situations by using vacuum grippers, it is inadequate for dexterous grippers to accurately manipulate objects.
@cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_8
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Abstract The motivation of this paper is to develop an intelligent robot assembly system using multi-modal vision for next-generation industrial assembly. The system includes two phases where in the first phase human beings demonstrate assembly to robots and in the second phase robots detect objects, plan grasps, and assemble objects following human demonstration using AI searching. A notorious difficulty to implement such a system is the bad precision of 3D visual detection. This paper presents multi-modal approaches to overcome the difficulty: It uses AR markers in the teaching phase to detect human operation, and uses point clouds and geometric constraints in the robot execution phase to avoid unexpected occlusion and noises. The paper presents several experiments to examine the precision and correctness of the approaches. It demonstrates the applicability of the approaches by integrating them with graph model-based motion planning, and by executing the results on industrial robots in real-world scenarios. 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 sensor, which also provides depth information beyond visual data. Nevertheless, it remains a challenging problem since multiple issues need to be addressed, such as low illumination inside shelves, clutter, texture-less and reflective objects as well as the limitations of depth sensors. This letter provides a new rich dataset for advancing the state-of-the-art in RGBD-based 3D object pose estimation, which is focused on the challenges that arise when solving warehouse pick-and-place tasks. The publicly available dataset includes thousands of images and corresponding ground truth data for the objects used during the first Amazon Picking Challenge at different poses and clutter conditions. Each image is accompanied with ground truth information to assist in the evaluation of algorithms for object detection. To show the utility of the dataset, a recent algorithm for RGBD-based pose estimation is evaluated in this letter. Given the measured performance of the algorithm on the dataset, this letter shows how it is possible to devise modifications and improvements to increase the accuracy of pose estimation algorithms. This process can be easily applied to a variety of different methodologies for object pose detection and improve performance in the domain of warehouse pick-and-place. We present a method for multi-class segmentation from RGB-D data in a realistic warehouse picking setting. The method computes pixel-wise probabilities and combines them to find a coherent object segmentation. It reliably segments objects in cluttered scenarios, even when objects are translucent, reflective, highly deformable, have fuzzy surfaces, or consist of loosely coupled components. The robust performance results from the exploitation of problem structure inherent to the warehouse setting. The proposed method proved its capabilities as part of our winning entry to the 2015 Amazon Picking Challenge. We present a detailed experimental analysis of the contribution of different information sources, compare our method to standard segmentation techniques, and assess possible extensions that further enhance the algorithm's capabilities. We release our software and data sets as open source. The state of the art in computer vision has rapidly advanced over the past decade largely aided by shared image datasets. However, most of these datasets tend to consist of assorted collections of images from the web that do not include 3D information or pose information. Furthermore, they target the problem of object category recognition—whereas solving the problem of object instance recognition might be sufficient for many robotic tasks. To address these issues, we present a highquality, large-scale dataset of 3D object instances, with accurate calibration information for every image. We anticipate that “solving” this dataset will effectively remove many perceptionrelated problems for mobile, sensing-based robots. The contributions of this work consist of: (1) BigBIRD, a dataset of 100 objects (and growing), composed of, for each object, 600 3D point clouds and 600 high-resolution (12 MP) images spanning all views, (2) a method for jointly calibrating a multi-camera system, (3) details of our data collection system, which collects all required data for a single object in under 6 minutes with minimal human effort, and (4) multiple software components (made available in open source), used to automate multi-sensor calibration and the data collection process. All code and data are available at http: rll.eecs.berkeley.edu bigbird.