#439527 It’s (Still) Really Hard for Robots to ...Every time we think that we’re getting a little bit closer to a household robot, new research comes out showing just how far we have to go. Certainly, we’ve seen lots of progress in specific areas like grasping and semantic understanding and whatnot, but putting it all together into a hardware platform that can actually get stuff done autonomously still seems quite a way off. In a paper presented at ICRA 2021 this month, researchers from the University of Bremen conducted a “Robot Household Marathon Experiment,” where a PR2 robot was tasked with first setting a table for a simple breakfast and then cleaning up afterwards in order to “investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation.” While this sort of thing kinda seems like something robots should have figured out, it may not surprise you to learn that it’s actually still a significant challenge. PR2’s job here is to prepare breakfast by bringing a bowl, a spoon, a cup, a milk box, and a box of cereal to a dining table. After breakfast, the PR2 then has to place washable objects into the dishwasher, put the cereal box back into its storage location, toss the milk box into the trash. The objects vary in shape and appearance, and the robot is only given symbolic descriptions of object locations (in the fridge, on the counter). It’s a very realistic but also very challenging scenario, which probably explains why it takes the poor PR2 90 minutes to complete it.
First off, kudos to that PR2 for still doing solid robotics research, right? And this research is definitely solid—the fact that all of this stuff works as well as it does, perception, motion planning, grasping, high level strategizing, is incredibly impressive. Remember, this is 90 minutes of full autonomy doing tasks that are relatively complex in an environment that’s only semi-structured and somewhat, but not overly, robot-optimized. In fact, over five trials, the robot succeeded in the table setting task five times. It wasn’t flawless, and the PR2 did have particular trouble with grasping tricky objects like the spoon, but the framework that the researchers developed was able to successfully recover from every single failure by tweaking parameters and retrying the failed action. Arguably, failing a lot but also being able to recover a lot is even more useful than not failing at all, if you think long term. The clean up task was more difficult for the PR2, and it suffered unrecoverable failures during two of the five trials. The paper describes what happened:
While we’re focusing a little bit on the failures here, that’s really just to illustrate the exceptionally challenging edge cases that the robot encountered. Again, I want to emphasize that while the PR2 was not successful all the time, its performance over 90 minutes of fully autonomous operation is still very impressive. And I really appreciate that the researchers committed to an experiment like this, putting their robot into a practical(ish) environment doing practical(ish) tasks under full autonomy over a long(ish) period of time. We often see lots of incremental research headed in this general direction, but it’ll take a lot more work like we’re seeing here for robots to get real-world useful enough to reliably handle those critical breakfast tasks. The Robot Household Marathon Experiment, by Gayane Kazhoyan, Simon Stelter, Franklin Kenghagho Kenfack, Sebastian Koralewski and Michael Beetz from the CRC EASE at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Germany, was presented at ICRA 2021. |
-
Humanoid Gallery
Popular Searches
Copyright © 2024 Android Humanoid - All Rights Reserved
All trademarks and copyrights owned by their respective owners and are used for illustration only