Research showcase: SLMC group, The University  of Edinburgh

In this page, we will introduce cooking-related research from Statistical Learning and Motion Control (SLMC) Group,  The University of Edinburgh, the U.K.

Long-term task: cutting and arranging pizza

  Nextage open cuts and arranges a pizza. The task consists in a robot picking a pickle and fixing on the cutting board, cutting a pickle with a vegetable knife, followed by placing a piece of it on a pizza dough and returning the remaining to the storage box. Then picking the box with pizza and moving it to the cutting board, cutting the pizza with a pizza cutter, and finally placing the box and knives in their initial positions. 

  One effective strategy for handling a long-horizon task is to break it down into short-horizon subgoals, that the robot can execute sequentially. The long-horizon task requires the robot to consider: (1) the order of the subtasks, (2) multiple subtask selection, (3) coordination of dual-arm, and (4) variations within a subtask. In this paper, we propose extending a predictive learning model using deep neural networks with a Subgoal Proposal Module (SPM), with the goal of making such tasks realizable. 

  This work was presented in IEEE ICRA 2023[3].

[3] Namiko Saito,  Joao Moura, Tetsuya Ogata, Marina Y. Aoyama, Shingo Murata, Shigeki Sugano, and Sethu Vijayakumar, "Structured Motion Generation with Predictive Learning: Proposing Subgoal for Long-Horizon Manipulation," In Proceedings of 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), pp. 9566-9572, 2023. doi: 10.1109/ICRA48891.2023.10161046.

(Writer: Namiko Saito, 16th/Mar/2024)