Organizational Unit:
Healthcare Robotics Lab

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Multimodal Execution Monitoring for Anomaly Detection During Robot Manipulation
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-05) Park, Daehyung ; Erickson, Zackory ; Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh ; Kemp, Charles C.
    Online detection of anomalous execution can be valuable for robot manipulation, enabling robots to operate more safely, determine when a behavior is inappropriate, and otherwise exhibit more common sense. By using multiple complementary sensory modalities, robots could potentially detect a wider variety of anomalies, such as anomalous contact or a loud utterance by a human. However, task variability and the potential for false positives make online anomaly detection challenging, especially for long-duration manipulation behaviors. In this paper, we provide evidence for the value of multimodal execution monitoring and the use of a detection threshold that varies based on the progress of execution. Using a data-driven approach, we train an execution monitor that runs in parallel to a manipulation behavior. Like previous methods for anomaly detection, our method trains a hidden Markov model (HMM) using multimodal observations from non-anomalous executions. In contrast to prior work, our system also uses a detection threshold that changes based on the execution progress. We evaluated our approach with haptic, visual, auditory, and kinematic sensing during a variety of manipulation tasks performed by a PR2 robot. The tasks included pushing doors closed, operating switches, and assisting ablebodied participants with eating yogurt. In our evaluations, our anomaly detection method performed substantially better with multimodal monitoring than single modality monitoring. It also resulted in more desirable ROC curves when compared with other detection threshold methods from the literature, obtaining higher true positive rates for comparable false positive rates.
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    Towards Assistive Feeding with a General-Purpose Mobile Manipulator
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-05) Park, Daehyung ; Kim, You Keun ; Erickson, Zackory ; Kemp, Charles C.
    General-purpose mobile manipulators have the potential to serve as a versatile form of assistive technology. However, their complexity creates challenges, including the risk of being too difficult to use. We present a proof-of-concept robotic system for assistive feeding that consists of a Willow Garage PR2, a high-level web-based interface, and specialized autonomous behaviors for scooping and feeding yogurt. As a step towards use by people with disabilities, we evaluated our system with 5 able-bodied participants. All 5 successfully ate yogurt using the system and reported high rates of success for the system’s autonomous behaviors. Also, Henry Evans, a person with severe quadriplegia, operated the system remotely to feed an able-bodied person. In general, people who operated the system reported that it was easy to use, including Henry. The feeding system also incorporates corrective actions designed to be triggered either autonomously or by the user. In an offline evaluation using data collected with the feeding system, a new version of our multimodal anomaly detection system outperformed prior versions.
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    A Robotic System for Reaching in Dense Clutter that Integrates Model Predictive Control, Learning, Haptic Mapping, and Planning
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-09) Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh ; Grice, Phillip M. ; Kapusta, Ariel ; Killpack, Marc D. ; Park, Daehyung ; Kemp, Charles C.
    We present a system that enables a robot to reach locations in dense clutter using only haptic sensing. Our system integrates model predictive control [1], learned initial conditions [2], tactile recognition of object types [3], haptic mapping, and geometric planning to efficiently reach locations using whole- arm tactile sensing [4]. We motivate our work, present a system architecture, summarize each component of the system, and present results from our evaluation of the system reaching to target locations in dense artificial foliage.
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    Learning to Reach into the Unknown: Selecting Initial Conditions When Reaching in Clutter
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-09) Park, Daehyung ; Kapusta, Ariel ; Kim, You Keun ; Rehg, James M. ; Kemp, Charles C.
    Often in highly-cluttered environments, a robot can observe the exterior of the environment with ease, but cannot directly view nor easily infer its detailed internal structure (e.g., dense foliage or a full refrigerator shelf). We present a data-driven approach that greatly improves a robot’s success at reaching to a goal location in the unknown interior of an environment based on observable external properties, such as the category of the clutter and the locations of openings into the clutter (i.e., apertures). We focus on the problem of selecting a good initial configuration for a manipulator when reaching with a greedy controller. We use density estimation to model the probability of a successful reach given an initial condition and then perform constrained optimization to find an initial condition with the highest estimated probability of success. We evaluate our approach with two simulated robots reaching in clutter, and provide a demonstration with a real PR2 robot reaching to locations through random apertures. In our evaluations, our approach significantly outperformed two alter- native approaches when making two consecutive reach attempts to goals in distinct categories of unknown clutter. Notably, our approach only uses sparse readily-apparent features.
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    Interleaving Planning and Control for Efficient Haptically-guided Reaching in Unknown Environments
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014) Park, Daehyung ; Kapusta, Ariel ; Hawke, Jeffrey ; Kemp, Charles C.
    We present a new method for reaching in an initially unknown environment with only haptic sensing. In this paper, we propose a haptically-guided interleaving planning and control (HIPC) method with a haptic mapping framework. HIPC runs two planning methods, interleaving a task-space and a joint-space planner, to provide fast reaching performance. It continually replans a valid trajectory, alternating between planners and quickly reflecting collected tactile information from an unknown environment. One key idea is that tactile sensing can be used to directly map an immediate cause of interference when reaching. The mapping framework efficiently assigns raw tactile information from whole-arm tactile sensors into a 3D voxel-based collision map. Our method uses a previously published contact-regulating controller based on model predictive control (MPC). In our evaluation with a physics simulation of a humanoid robot, interleaving was superior at reaching in the 9 types of environments we used.