Multi-camera coverage of deformable contour shapes

Abstract

Perception of deformation is a key problem when dealing with autonomous manipulation of deformable objects. Particularly, this work is motivated by tasks where the manipulated object follows a prescribed known deformation with the goal of performing a desired coverage of the objects contour along its deformation. The main contribution is a simple yet effective novel perception system in which a team of robots equipped with limited field-of-view cameras covers the object's contour according to a prescribed visibility objective. In order to define a feasible visibility objective, we propose a new method for obtaining the maximum achievable visibility of a contour from a circumference around its centroid. Then, we define a constrained optimization problem and we solve it iteratively to compute the minimum number of cameras and their nearoptimal positions around the object that guarantee the visibility objective, over the entire deformation process.

Minimal multi-camera system for perception of deformable shapes

“…We have performed a series of simulations to analyze the validity of our method and explore future improvements. More details about this work can be found in [4].…”

Placement of Optical Sensors in 3D Terrain Using a Bacterial Evolutionary Algorithm

“…The optimization goal was maximization of the pixel density on the area [ 49 ]. Herguedas et al examined the optimal sensor placement for deformable bodies [ 50 ]. The procedure was later improved using RGB-D cameras [ 51 ].…”

RGB-D Tracking and Optimal Perception of Deformable Objects

“…The NBV is usually present in the autonomous generation of complete 3D model of objects [21]. The problem of time-varying scenes requires multi-sensor approaches like [22], where several cameras are optimised in order to perceive a deformable target object. It is also common to find NBV in applications for exploring unknown environments and objects [23].…”