Connor Gäde

Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Connor Gäde, Philipp Allgeuer et al.

This paper introduces a novel zero-shot motion planning method that allows users to quickly design smooth robot motions in Cartesian space. A Bézier curve-based Cartesian plan is transformed into a joint space trajectory by our neuro-inspired inverse kinematics (IK) method CycleIK, for which we enable platform independence by scaling it to arbitrary robot designs. The motion planner is evaluated on the physical hardware of the two humanoid robots NICO and NICOL in a human-in-the-loop grasping scenario. Our method is deployed with an embodied agent that is a large language model (LLM) at its core. We generalize the embodied agent, that was introduced for NICOL, to also embody NICO. The agent can execute a discrete set of physical actions and allows the user to verbally instruct various different robots. We contribute a grasping primitive to its action space that allows for precise manipulation of household objects. The updated CycleIK method is compared to popular numerical IK solvers and state-of-the-art neural IK methods in simulation and is shown to be competitive with or outperform all evaluated methods when the algorithm runtime is very short. The grasping primitive is evaluated on both NICOL and NICO robots with a reported grasp success of 72% to 82% for each robot, respectively.

Lennart Clasmeier, Jan-Gerrit Habekost, Connor Gäde et al.

We propose a novel diffusion-based action model for robotic motion planning. Commonly, established numerical planning approaches are used to solve general motion planning problems, but have significant runtime requirements. By leveraging the power of deep learning, we are able to achieve good results in a much smaller runtime by learning from a dataset generated by these planners. While our initial model uses point cloud embeddings in the input to predict keypoint-based joint sequences in its output, we observed in our ablation study that it remained challenging to condition the network on the point cloud embeddings. We identified some biases in our dataset and refined it, which improved the model's performance. Our model, even without the use of the point cloud encodings, outperforms numerical models by an order of magnitude regarding the runtime, while reaching a success rate of up to 90% of collision free solutions on the test set.