Annotation Scaffolds for Object Modeling and Manipulation
This addresses the challenge of making robot-object interaction programming accessible to non-experts, though it appears incremental relative to existing CAD-like interfaces.
The paper tackles the problem of simplifying object modeling and manipulation task specification for novice users by introducing annotation scaffolds that add simple cues to object models. The approach was tested with a PR2 robot platform and shown to be successful using shape comparison, grasping, and manipulation metrics.
We present and evaluate an approach for human-in-the-loop specification of shape reconstruction with annotations for basic robot-object interactions. Our method is based on the idea of model annotation: the addition of simple cues to an underlying object model to specify shape and delineate a simple task. The goal is to explore reducing the complexity of CAD-like interfaces so that novice users can quickly recover an object's shape and describe a manipulation task that is then carried out by a robot. The object modeling and interaction annotation capabilities are tested with a user study and compared against results obtained using existing approaches. The approach has been analyzed using a variety of shape comparison, grasping, and manipulation metrics, and tested with the PR2 robot platform, where it was shown to be successful.