Interactive Perception of Articulated Objects

We present a skill for the perception of three-dimensional kinematic structures of rigid articulated bodies with revolute and prismatic joints. The ability to acquire such models autonomously is required for general manipulation in unstructured environments. Experiments on a mobile manipulation platform with real-world objects under varying lighting conditions demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method. This robustness is achieved by integrating perception and manipulation capabilities: the manipulator interacts with the environment to move an unknown object, thereby creating a perceptual signal that reveals the kinematic properties of the object. For good performance, the perceptual skill requires the presence of trackable visual features in the scene.