Localization and Tracking of User-Defined Points on Deformable Objects for Robotic Manipulation
This addresses the challenge of perceiving non-rigid objects in industrial manufacturing processes, representing an incremental improvement in robotic manipulation.
The paper tackles the problem of localizing and tracking user-defined points on deformable objects for robotic manipulation by proposing a discretized deformation field estimated with a multi-step non-linear solver pipeline, achieving online solution in a data-parallel manner suitable for industrial applications.
This paper introduces an efficient procedure to localize user-defined points on the surface of deformable objects and track their positions in 3D space over time. To cope with a deformable object's infinite number of DOF, we propose a discretized deformation field, which is estimated during runtime using a multi-step non-linear solver pipeline. The resulting high-dimensional energy minimization problem describes the deviation between an offline-defined reference model and a pre-processed camera image. An additional regularization term allows for assumptions about the object's hidden areas and increases the solver's numerical stability. Our approach is capable of solving the localization problem online in a data-parallel manner, making it ideally suitable for the perception of non-rigid objects in industrial manufacturing processes.