Critically fast pick-and-place with suction cups

Fast robotics pick-and-place with suction cups is a crucial component in the current development of automation in logistics (factory lines, e-commerce, etc.). By “critically fast” we mean the fastest possible movement for transporting an object such that it does not slip or fall from the suction cup. The main difficulties are: (i) handling the contact between the suction cup and the object, which fundamentally involves kinodynamic constraints; and (ii) doing so at a low computational cost, typically a few hundreds of milliseconds. To address these difficulties, we propose (a) a model for suction cup contacts, (b) a procedure to identify the contact stability constraint based on that model, and (c) a pipeline to parameterize, in a time-optimal manner, arbitrary geometric paths under the identified contact stability constraint. We experimentally validate the proposed pipeline on a physical robot system: the cycle time for a typical pick-and-place task was less than 5 seconds, planning and execution times included. The full pipeline is released as opensource for the robotics community.

[1]  J. Bobrow,et al.  Time-Optimal Control of Robotic Manipulators Along Specified Paths , 1985 .

[2]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  RRT-connect: An efficient approach to single-query path planning , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[3]  Josep M. Porta,et al.  Randomized Kinodynamic Planning for Constrained Systems , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[4]  Komei Fukuda,et al.  Double Description Method Revisited , 1995, Combinatorics and Computer Science.

[5]  Miomir Vukobratovic,et al.  Zero-Moment Point - Thirty Five Years of its Life , 2004, Int. J. Humanoid Robotics.

[6]  Siddhartha S. Srinivasa,et al.  CHOMP: Covariant Hamiltonian optimization for motion planning , 2013, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[7]  Yoshihiko Nakamura,et al.  Leveraging Cone Double Description for Multi-contact Stability of Humanoids with Applications to Statics and Dynamics , 2015, Robotics: Science and Systems.

[8]  Arjang Hourtash.  The kinematic Hessian and higher derivatives , 2005, 2005 International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation.

[9]  Akos Nagy,et al.  Near Time-Optimal Path Tracking Method for Waiter Motion Problem , 2017 .

[10]  Quang-Cuong Pham,et al.  A General, Fast, and Robust Implementation of the Time-Optimal Path Parameterization Algorithm , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[11]  Kris K. Hauser,et al.  Fast interpolation and time-optimization with contact , 2014, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[12]  Raimund Seidel,et al.  Small-dimensional linear programming and convex hulls made easy , 1991, Discret. Comput. Geom..

[13]  Peter I. Corke,et al.  Cartman: The Low-Cost Cartesian Manipulator that Won the Amazon Robotics Challenge , 2017, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[14]  Yoshihiko Nakamura,et al.  ZMP Support Areas for Multicontact Mobility Under Frictional Constraints , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[15]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  Randomized Kinodynamic Planning , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[16]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  OpenRAVE: A Planning Architecture for Autonomous Robotics , 2008 .

[17]  Stephen P. Boyd,et al.  Convex Optimization , 2004, Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook.

[18]  Yoshihiko Nakamura,et al.  Admissible velocity propagation: Beyond quasi-static path planning for high-dimensional robots , 2017, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[19]  Yoshihiko Nakamura,et al.  Stability of surface contacts for humanoid robots: Closed-form formulae of the Contact Wrench Cone for rectangular support areas , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[20]  Guy Bessonnet,et al.  Forces acting on a biped robot. Center of pressure-zero moment point , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[21]  Quang-Cuong Pham,et al.  Dynamic non-prehensile object transportation , 2014, 2014 13th International Conference on Control Automation Robotics & Vision (ICARCV).

[22]  S. Zucker,et al.  Toward Efficient Trajectory Planning: The Path-Velocity Decomposition , 1986 .

[23]  Oliver Brock,et al.  Analysis and Observations From the First Amazon Picking Challenge , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.

[24]  Jeffrey C. Trinkle,et al.  Stability characterizations of rigid body contact problems with coulomb friction , 2000 .

[25]  Arkadi Nemirovski,et al.  On Polyhedral Approximations of the Second-Order Cone , 2001, Math. Oper. Res..

[26]  Andrés Kecskeméthy,et al.  Time-Optimal Path Planning for the General Waiter Motion Problem , 2013 .

[27]  David Avis,et al.  Reverse Search for Enumeration , 1996, Discret. Appl. Math..

[28]  Kris K. Hauser,et al.  Robust trajectory optimization under frictional contact with iterative learning , 2015, Auton. Robots.

[29]  M. Diehl,et al.  Practical Time-Optimal Trajectory Planning for Robots: a Convex Optimization Approach , 2008 .

[30]  Quang-Cuong Pham,et al.  A New Approach to Time-Optimal Path Parameterization Based on Reachability Analysis , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.