This paper describes a new robotic tabletop rearrangement system, and presents experimental results. The tasks involve rearranging as many as 30 to 100 blocks, sometimes packed with a density of up to 40%. The high packing factor forces the system to push several objects at a time, making accurate simulation difficult, if not impossible. Nonetheless, the system achieves goals specifying the pose of every object, with an average precision of ± 1 mm and ± 2°. The system searches through policy rollouts of simulated pushing actions, using an Iterated Local Search technique to escape local minima. In real world execution, the system executes just one action from a policy, then uses a vision system to update the estimated task state, and replans. The system accepts a fully general description of task goals, which means it can solve the singulation and separation problems addressed in prior work, but can also solve sorting problems and spell out words, among other things. The paper includes examples of several solved problems, statistical analysis of the system's behavior on different types of problems, and some discussion of limitations, insights, and future work.

Place recognition and loop closure detection are challenging for long-term visual navigation tasks. SeqSLAM is considered to be one of the most successful approaches to achieve long-term localization under varying environmental conditions and changing viewpoints. SeqSLAM uses a brute-force sequential matching method, which is computationally intensive. In this work, we introduce a multi-resolution sampling-based global visual place recognition method (MRS-VPR), which can significantly improve the matching efficiency and accuracy in sequential matching. The novelty of this method lies in the coarse-to-fine searching pipeline and a particle filter-based global sampling scheme, that can balance the matching efficiency and accuracy in the long-term navigation task. Moreover, our model works much better than SeqSLAM when the testing sequence is over a much smaller time scale than the reference sequence. Our experiments demonstrate that MRSVPR is efficient in locating short temporary trajectories within long-term reference ones without compromising on the accuracy compared to SeqSLAM.

Threaded fasteners are prevalent throughout modern manufacturing. Thus, as the demand for automation in manufacturing increases, so does the demand for automated threaded fastening systems. However, many fundamental issues and engineering challenges still hinder robustness in automation, particularly for smaller screws and critical product finishing requirements. This paper surveys the state of the art in threaded fastening automation and discusses open questions for further research. This survey covers the following areas: 1) fundamentals of threaded fastening, including basic concepts and definitions; 2) analysis of the entire assembly process (consisting of part feeding and orientation, pickup, alignment, and driving), including discussions of tools, control strategies, and other considerations; 3) failure modes and techniques to mitigate them; 4) threaded fastening systems and electromechanical approaches; and 5) open challenges and suggestions for future development. Understanding the current state of automation in threaded fastening will provide a foundation for researchers to advance this field.

In this paper, we consider reorienting 3D objects on a table using a two-finger pinch gripper. Given the 3D mesh model of the object, our algorithm solves for the gripper motions that are required to transit between arbitrary object poses, grasping positions and gripper poses. The two motion primitives we used, pivoting and compliant rolling, enable us to decompose the planning problem and solve it more efficiently. Our algorithm can work with approximated (simplified) mesh models while being robust to approximation errors, thereby allowing us to efficiently handle object shapes with originally thousands of facets. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by testing on objects with non-trivial geometry in both simulations and experiments. Results show that our algorithm can solve a larger range of reorienting problems with less number of making and breaking contacts when compared to traditional pick-and-place based methods, especially when the gripper workspace is highly constrained.

Hundreds of billions of small screws are assembled in consumer electronics industry every year, yet reliably automating the screwdriving process remains one of the most challenging tasks. Two barriers to further adoption of robotic threaded fastening systems are system cost and technical challenges, especially for small screws. An affordable intelligent screwdriving system that can support online stage and result classification is the first step to bridge the gap. To this end, starting from a state transition graph of screwdriving processes and a labeled screwdriving dataset (1862 runs of M1.4 screws) on multiple sensor signals, we develop classification algorithms and perform sensor reduction. Fast and accurate result classifiers are developed using linear discriminant analysis, while a wrapper method for feature subset selection is used to identify the optimal feature subset and corresponding sensor signals to reduce cost. A stage classifier based on decision tree is developed using the optimal sensor subset. The stage classifier achieves high accuracy in realtime prediction of various stages when augmented with the state transition graph.

The recent progress of advanced vehicle control systems presents a great opportunity for the application of model predictive control (MPC) in the automotive industry. However, high computational complexity inherently associated with the receding horizon optimization must be addressed to achieve real-time implementation. This paper presents a generic scale reduction framework to reduce the online computational burden of MPC controllers. A lower dimensional MPC algorithm is formulated by combining an existing “move blocking ” strategy with a “constraint-set compression” strategy, which is proposed to further reduce the problem scale by partially relaxing inequality constraints in the prediction horizon. The closed-loop stability is guaranteed by adding terminal zero-state constraint. The tradeoff between control optimality and computational intensity is achieved by proper design of the blocking and compression matrices. The fast algorithm has been applied on intelligent vehicular longitudinal automation, implemented as a fuel economy-oriented adaptive cruise controller and experimentally evaluated by a series of real-time simulations and field tests. These results indicate that the proposed method significantly improves the computational speed while maintaining satisfactory control optimality without sacrificing the desired performance.

Hazardous terrains pose a crucial challenge to the operation of mobile robots, especially for military applications such as surveillance, casualty extraction, etc. To enable their safe and efficient operations, it is necessary to detect the terrain type and to modify operation and control strategies in real-time. Fast wheel-terrain interaction models suitable for real-time applications are thus important. In this paper, closed-form analytical expressions of the integrated stress equations were derived by quadratic approximation of the stresses along the wheel-soil interface. Meanwhile, the bulldozing resistance and the influence of grousers are also modeled for more accurate prediction of the vehicle motion. A non-iterative method was proposed to estimate the wheel-soil contact geometry, i.e., the entry angle, according to the wheel load, by approximating the vertical pressure distribution with a sinusoidal function or linear function depending on the sinkage exponent of the soil. Computation efficiency is improved by avoiding traditional recursive solution of the model under binary search. Online prediction and real-time control could be possible by using the developed closed-from wheel-soil interaction model and the entry angle estimator.