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Experimental Evaluation of a Perceptual Pipeline for Hierarchical Affordance Extraction

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Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 1))

Abstract

The perception of affordances in unknown environments is an essential prerequisite for autonomous humanoid robots. In our previous work we developed a perceptual pipeline for the extraction of affordances for loco-manipulation actions based on a simplified representation of the environment starting from RGB-D camera images. The feasibility of this approach has been demonstrated in various examples in simulation as well as on real robotic platforms. The overall goal of the perceptual pipeline is to provide a robust and reliable perceptual mechanism for affordance-based action execution.

In this work we evaluate the performance of the perceptual pipeline in combination with sensor systems other than RGB-D cameras, in order to utilize redundant sensor equipment of humanoid robots. This is particularly important when considering challenging scenarios where particular sensors are not applicable, e.g. due to intense sunlight or reflective surfaces. In this work we focus on stereo cameras and LIDAR laser scanners.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SE(3) denotes the special Euclidean group.

  2. 2.

    WALK-MAN is equipped with a MultiSense SL sensor head from Carnegie Robotics containing a LIDAR sensor and a stereo camera system. The LIDAR scanner captures 1024 points per scan and was configured to rotate with 0.5 rad/sec. The stereo camera system produces point clouds using semi-global matching based on 1 Mpx camera images. No postprocessing filters have been applied in both cases.

  3. 3.

    In our experiments, we chose \(\varepsilon = 0.1\).

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 611832 (WALK-MAN).

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Correspondence to Peter Kaiser .

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Kaiser, P., Aksoy, E.E., Grotz, M., Kanoulas, D., Tsagarakis, N.G., Asfour, T. (2017). Experimental Evaluation of a Perceptual Pipeline for Hierarchical Affordance Extraction. In: Kulić, D., Nakamura, Y., Khatib, O., Venture, G. (eds) 2016 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER 2016. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50115-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50115-4_13

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