Autonomous Mobile Manipulation


Description:

Autonomous Mobile Manipulation could be considered the holy grail of robotics: a successful approach to autonomous mobile manipulation has to integrate virtually every aspect of robotics, including mechanism and sensor design, low-level control, motion planning, machine learning, computer vision, and reasoning. Currently, most of the available robotic applications are either capable of performing a very limited set of skills, or can only operate in relatively structured environment. The task of bringing robots to houses and to our daily life remains a challenge. The commercial potential is promising. Truly autonomous robots could dramatically affect health care and planetary exploration. Moreover, those robots could contribute to logistic and military applications, maintain satellites in orbit, and many other tasks currently performed by humans. Research in AMM is also important in terms of advancing basic science.


The current status of Autonomous Mobile Manipulation is summarized in the following white papers:


Experimental Platform -- UMan:


Simulation Videos


Platform Demos



Publications

  • Dov Katz and Oliver Brock. Interactive Perception: Closing the Gap Between Action and Perception To Appear: Workshop: From features to actions - Unifying perspectives in computational and robot vision at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Rome, Italy, April 2007.
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  • Yuandong Yang and Oliver Brock. Elastic Roadmaps: Globally Task-Consistent Motion for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation in Dynamic Environments. In Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, Philadelphia, USA, August 2006.
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  • Dov Katz, Emily Horrell, Yuandong Yang, Brendan Burns, Thomas Buckley Anna Grishkan, Volodymyr Zhylkovskyy, Oliver Brock and Erik Learned-Miller. The UMass Mobile Manipulator UMan: An Experimental Platform for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation. In IEEE Workshop on Manipulation for Human Environments, Philadelphia, USA, August 2006.
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Grants

CRI: Experimental Platform for Robot Programming and Task Execution in Human Environments, award number CSE CNS 0647132 funded in the CRI program; REU supplement to CSE CNS 0454074.
CRI: Experimental Platform for Robot Programming and Task Execution in Human Environments, award number CSE CNS 0552319 funded in the CRI program; REU supplement to CSE CNS 0454074.
CAREER: Motion Capabilities for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation, award number CSE IIS 0545934 funded in the CAREER program.
Workshop on Autonomous Mobile Manipulation, award number CSE IIS 0515874.
CRI: Experimental Platform for Robot Programming and Task Execution in Human Environments, award number CSE CNS 0454074 funded in the CRI program.
Autonomous Manipulation Capabilities for Space and Surface Operations, funded under MIT/NASA cooperative agreement NNJ05HB61A.
Faculty Grant for Teaching: Mobile Robots in the Classroom as an Incentive for Interdisciplinary Studies in Computer Science and Engineering.