RGB-Only Reconstruction of Tabletop Scenes for Collision-Free Manipulator Control

Zhenggang Tang, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Jonathan Tremblay, Bowen Wen, Ye Yuan, Stephen Tyree, Charles Loop, Alexander Schwing, Stan Birchfield

NVIDIA & University of Illinois

We present a system for collision-free control of a robot manipulator that uses only RGB views of the world. Perceptual input of a tabletop scene is provided by multiple images of an RGB camera (without depth) that is either handheld or mounted on the robot end effector. A NeRF-like process is used to reconstruct the 3D geometry of the scene, from which the Euclidean full signed distance function (ESDF) is computed. A model predictive control algorithm is then used to control the manipulator to reach a desired pose while avoiding obstacles in the ESDF. We show results on a real dataset collected and annotated in our lab.