Through the Clutter: Exploring the Impact of Complex Environments on the Legibility of Robot Motion

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Schmidt-Wolf, Melanie, Becker, Tyler, Oliva, Denielle, Nicolescu, Monica, Feil-Seifer, David
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866929369188925440
author Schmidt-Wolf, Melanie
Becker, Tyler
Oliva, Denielle
Nicolescu, Monica
Feil-Seifer, David
author_facet Schmidt-Wolf, Melanie
Becker, Tyler
Oliva, Denielle
Nicolescu, Monica
Feil-Seifer, David
contents The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid possible collisions, improve the workflow and help ensure the safety of the person. Prior work in this area, however, focuses on solutions that are tested only in uncluttered environments and there are not many results taken from cluttered environments. In this research we present a measure for clutteredness based on an entropic measure of the environment, and a novel motion planner based on potential fields. Both our measures and the planner were tested in a cluttered environment meant to represent a more typical tool sorting task for which the person would collaborate with a robot. The in-person validation study with Baxter robots shows a significant improvement in legibility of our proposed legible motion planner compared to the current state-of-the-art legible motion planner in cluttered environments. Further, the results show a significant difference in the performance of the planners in cluttered and uncluttered environments, and the need to further explore legible motion in cluttered environments. We argue that the inconsistency of our results in cluttered environments with those obtained from uncluttered environments points out several important issues with the current research performed in the area of legible motion planners.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_00119
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Through the Clutter: Exploring the Impact of Complex Environments on the Legibility of Robot Motion
Schmidt-Wolf, Melanie
Becker, Tyler
Oliva, Denielle
Nicolescu, Monica
Feil-Seifer, David
Robotics
The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid possible collisions, improve the workflow and help ensure the safety of the person. Prior work in this area, however, focuses on solutions that are tested only in uncluttered environments and there are not many results taken from cluttered environments. In this research we present a measure for clutteredness based on an entropic measure of the environment, and a novel motion planner based on potential fields. Both our measures and the planner were tested in a cluttered environment meant to represent a more typical tool sorting task for which the person would collaborate with a robot. The in-person validation study with Baxter robots shows a significant improvement in legibility of our proposed legible motion planner compared to the current state-of-the-art legible motion planner in cluttered environments. Further, the results show a significant difference in the performance of the planners in cluttered and uncluttered environments, and the need to further explore legible motion in cluttered environments. We argue that the inconsistency of our results in cluttered environments with those obtained from uncluttered environments points out several important issues with the current research performed in the area of legible motion planners.
title Through the Clutter: Exploring the Impact of Complex Environments on the Legibility of Robot Motion
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00119