Uploaded May 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
ICRA 2018 Spotlight Video
Interactive Session Thu AM Pod B.6
Authors: Wirnshofer, Florian; Schmitt, Philipp Sebastian; Feiten, Wendelin; v. Wichert, Georg; Burgard, Wolfram
Title: Robust, Compliant Assembly Via Optimal Belief Space Planning
Abstract:
In automated manufacturing, robots must reliably assemble parts of various geometries and low tolerances. Ideally, they plan the required motions autonomously. This poses a substantial challenge due to high-dimensional state spaces and non-linear contact-dynamics. Furthermore, object poses and model parameters, such as friction, are not exactly known and a source of uncertainty. The method proposed in this paper models the task of parts assembly as a belief space planning problem over an underlying impedance-controlled, compliant system. To solve this planning problem we introduce an asymptotically optimal belief space planner by extending an optimal, randomized, kinodynamic motion planner to non-deterministic domains. Under an expansiveness assumption we establish probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality. We validate our approach in thorough, simulated and real-world experiments of multiple assembly tasks. The experiments demonstrate our planner's ability to reliably assemble objects, solely based on CAD models as input.
ICRA 2018 Spotlight Video
Interactive Session Thu AM Pod B.6
Authors: Wirnshofer, Florian; Schmitt, Philipp Sebastian; Feiten, Wendelin; v. Wichert, Georg; Burgard, Wolfram
Title: Robust, Compliant Assembly Via Optimal Belief Space Planning
Abstract:
In automated manufacturing, robots must reliably assemble parts of various geometries and low tolerances. Ideally, they plan the required motions autonomously. This poses a substantial challenge due to high-dimensional state spaces and non-linear contact-dynamics. Furthermore, object poses and model parameters, such as friction, are not exactly known and a source of uncertainty. The method proposed in this paper models the task of parts assembly as a belief space planning problem over an underlying impedance-controlled, compliant system. To solve this planning problem we introduce an asymptotically optimal belief space planner by extending an optimal, randomized, kinodynamic motion planner to non-deterministic domains. Under an expansiveness assumption we establish probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality. We validate our approach in thorough, simulated and real-world experiments of multiple assembly tasks. The experiments demonstrate our planner's ability to reliably assemble objects, solely based on CAD models as input.








![Learning to Parse Natural Language to Grounded Reward Functions with Weak Supervision
ICRA 2018 Spotlight Video
Interactive Session Wed PM Pod I.1
Authors: Williams, Edward; Gopalan, Nakul; Rhee, Mina; Tellex, Stefanie
Title: Learning to Parse Natural Language to Grounded Reward Functions with Weak Supervision
Abstract:
In order to intuitively and efficiently collaborate with humans, robots must learn to complete tasks specified using natural language. We represent natural language instructions as goal-state reward functions specified using lambda calculus. Using reward functions as language representations allows robots to plan efficiently in stochastic environments. To map sentences to such reward functions, we learn a weighted linear Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) semantic parser. The parser, including both parameters and the CCG lexicon, is learned from a validation procedure that does not require execution of a planner, annotating reward functions, or labeling parse trees, unlike prior approaches. To learn a CCG lexicon and parse weights, we use coarse lexical generation and validation-driven perceptron weight updates using the approach of Artzi and Zettlemoyer [4]. We present results on the Cleanup World domain [19] to demonstrate the potential of our approach. We report an F1 score of 0.82 on a collected corpus of 23 tasks containing combinations of nested referential expressions, comparators and object properties with 2037 corresponding sentences. Our goal-condition learning approach enables an improvement of orders of magnitude in computation time over a baseline that performs planning during learning, while achieving comparable results. Further, we conduct an experiment with just 6 labeled demonstrations to show the ease of teaching a robot behaviors using our method. Learning to Parse Natural Language to Grounded Reward Functions with Weak Supervision](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/c9Up1R_jlew/mqdefault.jpg)

