Toward a library of manipulation actions based on semantic object-action relations

Abstract

The goal of this study is to provide an architecture for a generic definition of robot manipulation actions. We emphasize that the representation of actions presented here is "procedural". Thus, we will define the structural elements of our action representations as execution protocols. To achieve this, manipulations are defined using three levels. The toplevel defines objects, their relations and the actions in an abstract and symbolic way. A mid-level sequencer, with which the action primitives are chained, is used to structure the actual action execution, which is performed via the bottom level. This (lowest) level collects data from sensors and communicates with the control system of the robot. This method enables robot manipulators to execute the same action in different situations i.e. on different objects with different positions and orientations. In addition, two methods of detecting action failure are provided which are necessary to handle faults in system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, several different actions are performed on our robotic setup and results are shown. This way we are creating a library of human-like robot actions, which can be used by higher-level task planners to execute more complex tasks.

Structural bootstrapping at the sensorimotor level for the fast acquisition of action knowledge for cognitive robots

“…The resulting categorization allows for a better understanding of the underlying actions and their cognitive meanings. In [10] we demonstrate that the here-introduced action representation can be used to execute the respective action with a robot. Thus, learning the representation from observation together with robot execution does -we think -provide a substantial contribution to the field of cognitive robotics…”

“…In this paper we are concerned only with the observation phase (left side). The execution stage (right side) is described in [10] which shows the possibility of imitating actions with robots by directly using the here introduced representations.…”

Cut & recombine: reuse of robot action components based on simple language instructions

“…One action template represents one action (and its synonyms). Action templates are based on the action library developed by Aein et al (2013). In our work, we used 24 action templates from the manipulation action ontology presented by Wörgötter et al (2013) (see Table 1).…”

Convexity based object partitioning for robot applications

“…Several aspects, such as object recognition [19], robot grasping control [20], [21], and movement execution [22], rely on published work and will not be described here in detail.…”

“…For action execution we used the library of manipulation actions from [21], which is based on Semantic Event Chains (SECs) [20] and Modified Dynamic Movement Primitives (MDMPs) [22]. Here, specifically, we used a pick-and-place action, where the pose of the handle was calculated from its 3D shape obtained from the part partitioning algorithm.…”