Planning perception and action for cognitive mobile manipulators

• Published in: Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 9025; pp. 90250D - 90250D-7
• Main Authors: Gaschler, Andre, Nogina, Svetlana, Petrick, Ronald P. A, Knoll, Alois
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: SPIE 23.12.2013
• ISBN: 0819499420; 9780819499424
• ISSN: 0277-786X; 1996-756X
• DOI: 10.1117/12.2038967

We present a general approach to perception and manipulation planning for cognitive mobile manipulators. Rather than hard-coding single purpose robot applications, a robot should be able to reason about its basic skills in order to solve complex problems autonomously. Humans intuitively solve tasks in real-world scenarios by breaking down abstract problems into smaller sub-tasks and use heuristics based on their previous experience. We apply a similar idea for planning perception and manipulation to cognitive mobile robots. Our approach is based on contingent planning and run-time sensing, integrated in our knowledge of volumes" planning framework, called KVP. Using the general-purpose PKS planner, we model information-gathering actions at plan time that have multiple possible outcomes at run time. As a result, perception and sensing arise as necessary preconditions for manipulation, rather than being hard-coded as tasks themselves. We demonstrate the e ectiveness of our approach on two scenarios covering visual and force sensing on a real mobile manipulator.