Fast Perception, Planning, and Execution for a Robotic Butler: Wheeled Humanoid M-Hubo
This addresses the need for practical service robots for the aging population, though it is incremental as it builds on existing perception and planning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling service robots to perform daily tasks like fetching objects quickly in unknown environments by integrating 3D object detection with a kinematically optimal manipulation planner, resulting in a system that operates at 24% of human speed.
As the aging population grows at a rapid rate, there is an ever growing need for service robot platforms that can provide daily assistance at practical speed with reliable performance. In order to assist with daily tasks such as fetching a beverage, a service robot must be able to perceive its environment and generate corresponding motion trajectories. This becomes a challenging and computationally complex problem when the environment is unknown and thus the path planner must sample numerous trajectories that often are sub-optimal, extending the execution time. To address this issue, we propose a unique strategy of integrating a 3D object detection pipeline with a kinematically optimal manipulation planner to significantly increase speed performance at runtime. In addition, we develop a new robotic butler system for a wheeled humanoid that is capable of fetching requested objects at 24% of the speed a human needs to fulfill the same task. The proposed system was evaluated and demonstrated in a real-world environment setup as well as in public exhibition.