The CEA-List will present 2 recent advances at one of the most prestigious robotics conference ICRA 2021, May 30-June 5:
In grasping: We are addressing the grasp planning which is still an open issue in robotics, by developing an efficient procedure for generating reliable grasps given a known object pose. This procedure relies on a limited dataset of manually specified expert grasps, and use a mixed analytic and data-driven approach based on the use of a grasp quality metric and variational autoencoders. The performances of this method are assessed by generating grasps in simulation for three different objects. On this grasp planning task, this method reaches a global grasp success rate of 99.91% on 7000 trials.
For mobile robotics: During the off-road path following of a wheeled mobile robot in presence of poor grip conditions, the longitudinal velocity should offer high performance while at the same time being limited in order to maintain safe navigation. We are presenting a new approach of speed control, capable of limiting the lateral error below a given threshold, while maximizing the longitudinal velocity. This is accomplished using a neural network trained with a reinforcement learning method. This speed control is combined with an existing model-based predictive steering control, using a state estimator and dynamic observers. Simulated and experimental results show a decrease in tracking error, while maintaining a consistent travel time when compared to a classical constant speed method and to a kinematic speed fluctuation method.