RI: Small: Interactive Perception for Manipulating Non-Rigid Objects

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Traditional robotics research has adopted a sense-plan-act paradigm in which it is assumed that the sensors are capable of providing enough information in order to decide the next course of action. Humans and animals, however, frequently adopt a different approach, such as shuffling through a pile of unknown objects in order to identify an item of interest hidden beneath the pile. This project explores the concept of interactive perception (or manipulated-guided sensing), in which successive manipulations of objects in an environment are used to increase vision-based understanding of that environment, and vice versa. In particular, the project involves developing appropriate low-order models of highly non-rigid structures such as fabrics and textiles; constructing algorithms to perform real-time vision-based sensing of such objects in cluttered, unstructured environments; and building prototype robotic hardware for testing the resulting models and algorithms. The research forms an integral part of next-generation household service robots performing everyday tasks such as sorting and folding laundry.