Fast Recovery of Piled Deformable Objects Using Superquadrics

Fast robotic unloading of piled deformable box-like objects (e.g. box-like sacks), is undoubtedly of great importance to the industry. Existing systems although fast, can only deal with layered, neatly placed configurations of such objects. In this paper we discuss an approach which deals with both neatly placed and jumbled configurations of objects. We use a time of flight laser sensor mounted on the hand of a robot for data acquisition. Target objects are modeled with globally deformed superquadrics. Object vertices are detected and superquadric seeds are placed at these vertices. Seed refinement via region growing results in accurate object recovery. Our system exhibits a plethora of advantages the most important of which its speed. Experiments demonstrate that our system can be used for object unloading in real time, when a multi-processor computer is employed.