World Robot Challenge 2020 -- Partner Robot: A Data-Driven Approach for Room Tidying with Mobile Manipulator
This addresses the challenge of deploying safe and robust household service robots in real home environments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing robotics methods for a specific competition.
The paper tackled the problem of tidying up a household environment using a mobile manipulator by developing a data-driven robot system to adapt to real-world variations and edge cases, and the system won second prize in the World Robot Challenge 2020, verifying its effectiveness.
Tidying up a household environment using a mobile manipulator poses various challenges in robotics, such as adaptation to large real-world environmental variations, and safe and robust deployment in the presence of humans.The Partner Robot Challenge in World Robot Challenge (WRC) 2020, a global competition held in September 2021, benchmarked tidying tasks in the real home environments, and importantly, tested for full system performances.For this challenge, we developed an entire household service robot system, which leverages a data-driven approach to adapt to numerous edge cases that occur during the execution, instead of classical manual pre-programmed solutions. In this paper, we describe the core ingredients of the proposed robot system, including visual recognition, object manipulation, and motion planning. Our robot system won the second prize, verifying the effectiveness and potential of data-driven robot systems for mobile manipulation in home environments.