Go Fetch: Mobile Manipulation in Unstructured Environments
This work addresses automation challenges in service sectors like medical and domestic fields, though it appears incremental as it combines existing modules into a common framework.
The paper tackled the problem of integrating multiple robotic components into a unified system for mobile manipulation in unstructured indoor environments, demonstrating its effectiveness on a fetch-and-carry task with an object in an office setting.
With humankind facing new and increasingly large-scale challenges in the medical and domestic spheres, automation of the service sector carries a tremendous potential for improved efficiency, quality, and safety of operations. Mobile robotics can offer solutions with a high degree of mobility and dexterity, however these complex systems require a multitude of heterogeneous components to be carefully integrated into one consistent framework. This work presents a mobile manipulation system that combines perception, localization, navigation, motion planning and grasping skills into one common workflow for fetch and carry applications in unstructured indoor environments. The tight integration across the various modules is experimentally demonstrated on the task of finding a commonly available object in an office environment, grasping it, and delivering it to a desired drop-off location. The accompanying video is available at https://youtu.be/e89_Xg1sLnY.