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This paper addresses the challenges of vision-based manipulation for autonomous cutting and unpacking of transparent plastic bags in industrial setups, aligning with the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Industry 4.0, driven by data, connectivity, analytics, and robotics, promises enhanced accessibility and sustainability throughout the value chain. The integration of autonomous systems, including collaborative robots (cobots), into industrial processes is pivotal for efficiency and safety. The proposed solution employs advanced Machine Learning algorithms, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to identify transparent plastic bags under varying lighting and background conditions. Tracking algorithms and depth sensing technologies are utilized for 3D spatial awareness during pick and placement. The system addresses challenges in grasping and manipulation, considering optimal points, compliance control with vacuum gripping technology, and real-time automation for safe interaction in dynamic environments. The system's successful testing and validation in the lab with the FRANKA robot arm, showcases its potential for widespread industrial applications, while demonstrating effectiveness in automating the unpacking and cutting of transparent plastic bags for an 8-stack bulk-loader based on specific requirements and rigorous testing.

Subsea exploration, inspection, and intervention operations heavily rely on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). However, the inherent complexity of the underwater environment presents significant challenges to the operators of these vehicles. This paper delves into the challenges associated with navigation and maneuvering tasks in the teleoperation of ROVs, such as reduced situational awareness and heightened teleoperator workload. To address these challenges, we introduce an underwater Digital Twin (DT) system designed to enhance underwater teleoperation, enable autonomous navigation, support system monitoring, and facilitate system testing through simulation. Our approach involves a dynamic representation of the underwater robot and its environment using desktop virtual reality, as well as the integration of mapping, localization, path planning and simulation capabilities within the DT system. Our research demonstrates the system's adaptability, versatility and feasibility, highlighting significant challenges and, in turn, improving the teleoperators' situational awareness and reducing their workload., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, to be published in OCEANS 2024 Singapore Conference

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a crucial role in surveying marine environments, carrying out underwater inspection tasks, and ocean exploration. However, in order to ensure that the AUV is able to carry out its mission successfully, a control system capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions is required. Furthermore, to ensure the robotic platform's safe operation, the onboard controller should be able to operate under certain constraints. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of Model Predictive Path Integral Control (MPPI) for the control of an AUV. We utilise a non-linear model of the AUV to propagate the samples of the MPPI, which allow us to compute the control action in real time. We provide a detailed evaluation of the effect of the main hyperparameters on the performance of the MPPI controller. Furthermore, we compared the performance of the proposed method with a classical PID and Cascade PID approach, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed controller. Finally, we present results where environmental constraints are added and show how MPPI can handle them by simply incorporating those constraints in the cost function., Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures

In real-world applications, the ability to reason about incomplete knowledge, sensing, temporal notions, and numeric constraints is vital. While several AI planners are capable of dealing with some of these requirements, they are mostly limited to problems with specific types of constraints. This paper presents a new planning approach that combines contingent plan construction within a temporal planning framework, offering solutions that consider numeric constraints and incomplete knowledge. We propose a small extension to the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) to model (i) incomplete, (ii) knowledge sensing actions that operate over unknown propositions, and (iii) possible outcomes from non-deterministic sensing effects. We also introduce a new set of planning domains to evaluate our solver, which has shown good performance on a variety of problems., Comment: In Proceedings AREA 2022, arXiv:2207.09058

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are becoming increasingly important for different types of industrial applications. The generally high cost of (AUVs) restricts the access to them and therefore advances in research and technological development. However, recent advances have led to lower cost commercially available Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), which present a platform that can be enhanced to enable a high degree of autonomy, similar to that of a high-end (AUV). In this article, we present how a low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf (ROV) can be used as a foundation for developing versatile and affordable (AUVs). We introduce the required hardware modifications to obtain a system capable of autonomous operations as well as the necessary software modules. Additionally, we present a set of use cases exhibiting the versatility of the developed platform for intervention and mapping tasks.

This paper presents a novel dataset for the development of visual navigation and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) algorithms as well as for underwater intervention tasks. It differs from existing datasets as it contains ground truth for the vehicle's position captured by an underwater motion tracking system. The dataset contains distortion-free and rectified stereo images along with the calibration parameters of the stereo camera setup. Furthermore, the experiments were performed and recorded in a controlled environment, where current and waves could be generated allowing the dataset to cover a wide range of conditions - from calm water to waves and currents of significant strength.

A Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system must be robust to support long-term mobile vehicle and robot applications. However, camera and LiDAR based SLAM systems can be fragile when facing challenging illumination or weather conditions which degrade their imagery and point cloud data. Radar, whose operating electromagnetic spectrum is less affected by environmental changes, is promising although its distinct sensing geometry and noise characteristics bring open challenges when being exploited for SLAM. % However, there are still open challenges since most existing visual and LiDAR SLAM systems do not operate in bad weathers. This paper studies the use of a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave radar for SLAM in large-scale outdoor environments. We propose a full radar SLAM system, including a novel radar motion tracking algorithm that leverages radar geometry for reliable feature tracking. It also optimally compensates motion distortion and estimates pose by joint optimization. Its loop closure component is designed to be simple yet efficient for radar imagery by capturing and exploiting structural information of the surrounding environment. % while a scheme to reject ambiguous loop closure candidates is also designed specifically for radar. Extensive experiments on three public radar datasets, ranging from city streets and residential areas to countryside and highways, show competitive accuracy and reliability performance of the proposed radar SLAM system compared to the state-of-the-art LiDAR, vision and radar methods. The results show that our system is technically viable in achieving reliable SLAM in extreme weather conditions, e.g. heavy snow and dense fog, demonstrating the promising potential of using radar for all-weather localization and mapping., Comment: Under review

Robotic systems may frequently come across similar manipulation planning problems that result in similar motion plans. Instead of planning each problem from scratch, it is preferable to leverage previously computed motion plans, i.e., experiences, to ease the planning. Different approaches have been proposed to exploit prior information on novel task instances. These methods, however, rely on a vast repertoire of experiences and fail when none relates closely to the current problem. Thus, an open challenge is the ability to generalise prior experiences to task instances that do not necessarily resemble the prior. This work tackles the above challenge with the proposition that experiences are "decomposable" and "malleable", i.e., parts of an experience are suitable to relevantly explore the connectivity of the robot-task space even in non-experienced regions. Two new planners result from this insight: experience-driven random trees (ERT) and its bi-directional version ERTConnect. These planners adopt a tree sampling-based strategy that incrementally extracts and modulates parts of a single path experience to compose a valid motion plan. We demonstrate our method on task instances that significantly differ from the prior experiences, and compare with related state-of-the-art experience-based planners. While their repairing strategies fail to generalise priors of tens of experiences, our planner, with a single experience, significantly outperforms them in both success rate and planning time. Our planners are implemented and freely available in the Open Motion Planning Library., Comment: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Agile control of mobile manipulator is challenging because of the high complexity coupled by the robotic system and the unstructured working environment. Tracking and grasping a dynamic object with a random trajectory is even harder. In this paper, a multi-task reinforcement learning-based mobile manipulation control framework is proposed to achieve general dynamic object tracking and grasping. Several basic types of dynamic trajectories are chosen as the task training set. To improve the policy generalization in practice, random noise and dynamics randomization are introduced during the training process. Extensive experiments show that our policy trained can adapt to unseen random dynamic trajectories with about 0.1m tracking error and 75\% grasping success rate of dynamic objects. The trained policy can also be successfully deployed on a real mobile manipulator., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IROS2020

Deep convolutional neural networks generally perform well in underwater object recognition tasks on both optical and sonar images. Many such methods require hundreds, if not thousands, of images per class to generalize well to unseen examples. However, obtaining and labeling sufficiently large volumes of data can be relatively costly and time-consuming, especially when observing rare objects or performing real-time operations. Few-Shot Learning (FSL) efforts have produced many promising methods to deal with low data availability. However, little attention has been given in the underwater domain, where the style of images poses additional challenges for object recognition algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to evaluate and compare several supervised and semi-supervised Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods using underwater optical and side-scan sonar imagery. Our results show that FSL methods offer a significant advantage over the traditional transfer learning methods that fine-tune pre-trained models. We hope that our work will help apply FSL to autonomous underwater systems and expand their learning capabilities., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Global OCEANS 2020: Singapore - U.S. Gulf Coast

Numerous Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms have been presented in last decade using different sensor modalities. However, robust SLAM in extreme weather conditions is still an open research problem. In this paper, RadarSLAM, a full radar based graph SLAM system, is proposed for reliable localization and mapping in large-scale environments. It is composed of pose tracking, local mapping, loop closure detection and pose graph optimization, enhanced by novel feature matching and probabilistic point cloud generation on radar images. Extensive experiments are conducted on a public radar dataset and several self-collected radar sequences, demonstrating the state-of-the-art reliability and localization accuracy in various adverse weather conditions, such as dark night, dense fog and heavy snowfall.

Safe autonomous navigation is an essential and challenging problem for robots operating in highly unstructured or completely unknown environments. Under these conditions, not only robotic systems must deal with limited localisation information, but also their manoeuvrability is constrained by their dynamics and often suffer from uncertainty. In order to cope with these constraints, this manuscript proposes an uncertainty-based framework for mapping and planning feasible motions online with probabilistic safety-guarantees. The proposed approach deals with the motion, probabilistic safety, and online computation constraints by: (i) incrementally mapping the surroundings to build an uncertainty-aware representation of the environment, and (ii) iteratively (re)planning trajectories to goal that are kinodynamically feasible and probabilistically safe through a multi-layered sampling-based planner in the belief space. In-depth empirical analyses illustrate some important properties of this approach, namely, (a) the multi-layered planning strategy enables rapid exploration of the high-dimensional belief space while preserving asymptotic optimality and completeness guarantees, and (b) the proposed routine for probabilistic collision checking results in tighter probability bounds in comparison to other uncertainty-aware planners in the literature. Furthermore, real-world in-water experimental evaluation on a non-holonomic torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle and simulated trials in the Stairwell scenario of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge 2019 on a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle demonstrate the efficacy of the method as well as its suitability for systems with limited on-board computational power., Comment: The International Journal of Robotics Research (under review)

Unforeseen events are frequent in the real-world environments where robots are expected to assist, raising the need for fast replanning of the policy in execution to guarantee the system and environment safety. Inspired by human behavioural studies of obstacle avoidance and route selection, this paper presents a hierarchical framework which generates reactive yet bounded obstacle avoidance behaviours through a multi-layered analysis. The framework leverages the strengths of learning techniques and the versatility of dynamic movement primitives to efficiently unify perception, decision, and action levels via low-dimensional geometric descriptors of the environment. Experimental evaluation on synthetic environments and a real anthropomorphic manipulator proves that the robustness and generalisation capabilities of the proposed approach regardless of the obstacle avoidance scenario makes it suitable for robotic systems in real-world environments., Comment: Accepted for publication at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2019

In an attempt to confer robots with complex manipulation capabilities, dual-arm anthropomorphic systems have become an important research topic in the robotics community. Most approaches in the literature rely upon a great understanding of the dynamics underlying the system's behaviour and yet offer limited autonomous generalisation capabilities. To address these limitations, this work proposes a modelisation for dual-arm manipulators based on dynamic movement primitives laying in two orthogonal spaces. The modularity and learning capabilities of this model are leveraged to formulate a novel end-to-end learning-based framework which (i) learns a library of primitive skills from human demonstrations, and (ii) composes such knowledge simultaneously and sequentially to confront novel scenarios. The feasibility of the proposal is evaluated by teaching the iCub humanoid the basic skills to succeed on simulated dual-arm pick-and-place tasks. The results suggest the learning and generalisation capabilities of the proposed framework extend to autonomously conduct undemonstrated dual-arm manipulation tasks., Comment: Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS19)

Robots are becoming a vital ingredient in society. Some of their daily tasks require dual-arm manipulation skills in the rapidly changing, dynamic and unpredictable real-world environments where they have to operate. Given the expertise of humans in conducting these activities, it is natural to study humans' motions to use the resulting knowledge in robotic control. With this in mind, this work leverages human knowledge to formulate a more general, real-time, and less task-specific framework for dual-arm manipulation. The proposed framework is evaluated on the iCub humanoid robot and several synthetic experiments, by conducting a dual-arm pick-and-place task of a parcel in the presence of unexpected obstacles. Results suggest the suitability of the method towards robust and generalisable dual-arm manipulation.

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are being tasked with increasingly complex missions. The acoustic communications required for AUVs are, by the nature of the medium, low bandwidth while adverse environmental conditions underwater often mean they are also intermittent. This has motivated development of highly autonomous systems, which can operate independently of their operators for considerable periods of time. These missions often involve multiple vehicles leading not only to challenges in communications but also in command and control (C2). Specifically operators face complexity in controlling multi-objective, multi-vehicle missions, whilst simultaneously facing uncertainty over the current status and safety of several remote high value assets. Additionally, it may be required to perform command and control of these complex missions in a remote control room. In this paper, we propose a combination of an intuitive, natural language operator interface combined with communications that use platforms from multiple domains to relay data over different mediums and transmission modes, improving command and control of collaborative and fully autonomous missions. In trials, we have demonstrated an integrated system combining working prototypes with established commercial C2 software that enables the use of a natural language interface to monitor an AUV survey mission in an on-shore command and control centre., Comment: The definitive version of this preprint is to be Published in AUV2018 Keywords: Conversational agent, Natural Language Understanding, Chatbot, AUV, USV, Communication Relay, Acoustic, Communication

Synthetic aperture imaging systems achieve constant azimuth resolution by coherently summating the observations acquired along the aperture path. At this aim, their locations have to be known with subwavelength accuracy. In underwater Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS), the nature of propagation and navigation in water makes the retrieval of this information challenging. Inertial sensors have to be employed in combination with signal processing techniques, which are usually referred to as micronavigation. In this paper we propose a novel micronavigation approach based on the minimization of an error function between two contiguous pings having some mutual information. This error is obtained by comparing the vector space intersections between the pings orthogonal projectors. The effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach is demonstrated by means of simulations and by means of an experiment performed in a controlled environment., Comment: 12 pages, 19 figures

A warping operator consists of an invertible axis deformation applied either in the signal domain or in the corresponding Fourier domain. Additionally, a warping transformation is usually required to preserve the signal energy, thus preserving orthogonality and being invertible by its adjoint. Initially, the design of such operators has been motivated by the idea of suitably generalizing the properties of orthogonal time-frequency decompositions such as wavelets and filter banks, hence the energy preservation property was essential. Recently, warping operators have been employed for frequency dispersion compensation in the Fourier domain or the identification of waveforms similarity in the time domain. For such applications, the energy preservation requirement can be given up, thus making warping a special case of interpolation. In this context, the purpose of this work is to provide analytical models and efficient computational algorithms for time warping with respect to piecewise smooth warping maps by transposing and extending a theoretical framework which has been previously introduced for frequency warping. Moreover, the same approach is generalized to the case of warping without energy preservation, thus obtaining a fast interpolation operator with analytically defined and fast inverse operator., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, plus 5 page appendixes