Robot choosing helpful actions through affordance aware planning

In order for a robot to plan in realistic, fine grained state spaces, novel planning algorithms need to leverage knowledge inherent to the current task. This robot has been programming with knowledge about making recipes, specifically brownies, and needs to decide which tool would be helpful for the human at each time step.

Mobile Manipulation Challenge at ICRA 2012

Formed of students from Europe and the US, Team World participated in the Mobile Manipulation Challenge hosted by Willow Garage at ICRA 2012. The goal of the challenge was for the PR2 to autonomously clear dishes from a table, set the table (not implemented), pick up objects from a rotating table, and set them on the table. We worked over several days at ICRA to combine several code bases together to achieve what is shown in the video. Special thanks to Jihoon Lee (Brown), Stephen Bellens and Koen Buys of KU Leuven and Thomas Reuhr from TU München. Also, personal thanks to Chad Jenkins for the opportunity to participate.

PR2Con Sushi Challenge

As a team of students, we participated in a hackathon at PR2Con hosted by the University of Freiburg and Willow Garage. Our team’s goal was to program the robot to efficiently clear and set a table. The robot was to carry a tray to the table, stack the dishes on the tray and carry them away. To setup the table, the robot was to carry a set of clean dishes to the table, unstack them and set them in place. We were able to implement a significant portion of this behavior in the five days we had. Special thanks to Koen Buys (KU Leuven), Andreas Hertle and Jürgen Hess of (Freiburg) and Agata Kargol (Washington University). Also, personal thanks to Chad Jenkins for the opportunity to participate.

PR2 Commander, Brown - MIT Hackathon

The Brown Robotics lab hacked with a couple of researchers from MIT to integrate the natural language processing work of Stefanie Tellex, now Professor of CS at Brown, with the block manipulation capabilities developed previously at Brown. Thanks to Stefanie Tellex, Sam Prentice, Arjun Arumbakkam, Trevor Jay, Jihoon Lee, Jonathan Mace, Aaron Silverman, Evan Wallace and Chad Jenkins for the fun collaborative effort.

Brown PR2 Block Builder Hackathon

The Brown Robotics lab completed a 4-day hackathon to get the PR2 to build block castles created using a simple web-based client. We made heavy use of the PR2 object manipulation pipeline for the object manipulation and stacking. Thanks to Jihoon Lee, Jonathan Mace, Chris Crick, Arjun Arumbakkam, Trevor Jay and Chad Jenkins for the great hacking experience.