Guided Pushing for Object Singulation
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Abstract
We propose a novel method for a robot to separate
and segment objects in a cluttered tabletop environment. The
method leverages the fact that external object boundaries
produce visible edges within an object cluster. We achieve
this singulation of objects by using the robot arm to perform
pushing actions specifically selected to test whether particular
visible edges correspond to object boundaries. We verify the
separation of objects after a push by examining the clusters
formed by geometric segmentation of regions residing on the
table surface. To avoid explicitly representing and tracking
edges across push behaviors we aggregate over all edges in
a given orientation by representing the push-history as an
orientation histogram. By tracking the history of directions
pushed for each object cluster we can build evidence that a
cluster cannot be further separated. We present quantitative
and qualitative experimental results performed in a real home
environment by a mobile manipulator using input from an
RGB-D camera mounted on the robot’s head. We show that
our pushing strategy can more reliably obtain singulation in
fewer pushes than an approach, that does not explicitly reason
about boundary information.
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2012-10
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