Robot manipulation tasks such as tidying up a room or sorting piles of objects are a substantial challenge for robots, especially in scenarios with unknown objects. The objective of object singulation is to physically separate a set of cluttered objects through manipulation, a capability regarded as relevant for service robots operating in unstructured household environments. Further, the ability to separate unknown objects from surrounding objects provides great benefit for object detection, which still remains an open problem for overlapping objects. A key challenge of object singulation is the required interaction of multiple capabilities such as perception, manipulation and motion planning. Perception may fail because of occlusions from objects but also from occlusion by the manipulator itself. Manipulation actions such as grasping may also fail when attempting to manipulate objects that the perception systems fails to correctly segment. Motion planning is particularly prone to errors when applied in unknown, unstructured environments.
展开▼
