Towards Assistive Robotic Pick and Place in Open World Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces an assistive robotic system that autonomously picks and places objects in open environments using a laser pointer interface, improving efficiency and success rates without prior object modeling.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel assistive robot system with a laser pointer interface enabling autonomous pick-and-place in open environments without object modeling.

Findings

Significant improvement in runtime and grasp success rate

Accurate pick-and-place capabilities demonstrated in tabletop scenarios

Outperforms baseline methods in experimental evaluations

Abstract

Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface that is easy to learn, to use, and to understand. This paper takes a step forward in this direction. We present a robot system comprised of a robotic arm and a mobility scooter that provides both pick-and-drop and pick-and-place functionality for open world environments without modeling the objects or environment. The system uses a laser pointer to directly select an object in the world, with feedback to the user via projecting an interface into the world. Our evaluation over several experimental scenarios shows a significant improvement in both runtime and grasp success rate relative to a baseline from the literature [5], and furthermore demonstrates accurate pick and place capabilities for tabletop scenarios.