Creating and maintaining an accurate representation of the environment is an essential capability for every service robot. Especially semantic information is important for household robots acting in indoor environments. In this paper, we present a semantic mapping framework with modular map representations. Our system is capable of online mapping and object updating given object detections from RGB-D data and provides various 2D and 3D representations of the mapped objects. To undo wrong data association, we perform a refinement step when updating object shapes. Furthermore, we maintain a likelihood for each object to deal with false positive and false negative detections and keep the map updated. Our mapping system is highly efficient and achieves a run time of more than 10 Hz. We evaluated our approach in various environments using two different robots, i.e., a HSR by Toyota and a Care-O-Bot-4 by Fraunhofer. As the experimental results demonstrate, our system is able to generate maps that are close to the ground truth and outperforms an existing approach in terms of intersection over union, different distance metrics, and the number of correct object mappings. We plan to publish the code of our system for the final submission.
Although inverse kinematics of serial manipulators is a well studied problem, challenges still exist in finding smooth feasible solutions that are also collision aware. Furthermore, with collaborative and service robots gaining traction, different robotic systems have to work in close proximity. This means that the current inverse kinematics approaches have to not only avoid collisions with themselves but also collisions with other robot arms. Therefore, we present a novel approach to compute inverse kinematics for serial manipulators that take into account different constraints while trying to reach a desired end-effector position and/or orientation that avoids collisions with themselves and other arms. Unlike other constraint based approaches, we neither perform expensive inverse Jacobian computations nor do we require arms with redundant degrees of freedom. Instead, we formulate different constraints as weighted cost functions to be optimized by a non-linear optimization solver. Our approach is superior to the state-of-the-art CollisionIK in terms of collision avoidance in the presence of multiple arms in confined spaces with no detected collisions at all in all the experimental scenarios. When the probability of collision is low, our approach shows better performance at trajectory tracking as well. Additionally, our approach is capable of simultaneous yet decentralized control of multiple arms for trajectory tracking in intersecting workspace without any collisions.
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