Touch-based object localization in cluttered environments
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for autonomous robotic systems performing dexterous tasks, offering an incremental improvement by enhancing existing methods for outlier handling and computational efficiency.
The paper tackles the problem of touch-based object localization in cluttered environments, where outlier measurements reduce precision, by applying RANSAC to a Bayesian framework and accelerating the Bayesian updating step with a fast method for finding the most probable object face. Experiments show the algorithm achieves accurate localization in practical times, even with corrupted measurements.
Touch-based object localization is an important component of autonomous robotic systems that are to perform dexterous tasks in real-world environments. When the objects to locate are placed within clutters, this touch-based procedure tends to generate outlier measurements which, in turn, can lead to a significant loss in localization precision. Our first contribution is to address this problem by applying the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) method to a Bayesian estimation framework. As RANSAC requires repeatedly applying the (computationally intensive) Bayesian updating step, it is crucial to improve that step in order to achieve practical running times. Our second contribution is therefore a fast method to find the most probable object face that corresponds to a given touch measurement, which yields a significant acceleration of the Bayesian updating step. Experiments show that our overall algorithm provides accurate localization in practical times, even when the measurements are corrupted by outliers.