Jesús Savage

Marco Negrete, Jesús Savage, José Avendaño

Manipulation is a key capability in domestic service robots, as can be seen in the rulebooks of last Robocup@Home editions. Currently, object recognition is performed based mostly on visual information. Some robots use also 3D information such as point clouds or laser scans but, to the knowledge of authors, robots don't use physical properties to improve object recognition. Estimation of an object's weight during a manipulation task is something new in the @Home league and such ability can improve performance of domestic service robots. In this work we propose to estimate the weight of the grasped object using Sliding Mode Observers. If we consider the manipulator without load as the nominal system and object's weight as a fault signal, we can estimate such weight by an appropriate filtering of the output error injection term of the sliding mode observer. To implement our proposal we used MATLAB and Simulink Robotics System Toolbox, ROS Toolbox and Simscape. To improve computation time we exported all algorithms to standalone ROS nodes from Simulink models. Tests were performed using two platforms: Justina's left manipulator (a robot developed at Biorobotics Laboratory, UNAM) and Neuronics Katana manipulators. We present results in simulation and discuss the performance of the proposed system and the possible sources of error. Finally we present our conclusions and state the future work.

Abel Pacheco-Ortega, Hugo Estrada, Edgar Vázquez et al.

This work introduces our approach to the flat and textureless object grasping problem. In particular, we address the tableware and cutlery manipulation problem where a service robot has to clean up a table. Our solution integrates colour and 2D and 3D geometry information to describe objects, and this information is given to the robot action planner to find the best grasping trajectory depending on the object class. Furthermore, we use visual feedback as a verification step to determine if the grasping process has successfully occurred. We evaluate our approach in both an open and a standard service robot platform following the RoboCup@Home international tournament regulations.