Daniel Seita, Justin Kerr, John Canny, Ken Goldberg
University of California, Berkeley
News and timeline:
August 13, 2021: submitted paper.
August 14, 2021: updated project website with videos.
September 05, 2021: submitted final (accepted) version to the IROS 2021 workshop on deformable manipulation. See link above.
If you have questions about this work, email Daniel (dseita@andrew.cmu.edu). Edit: now seita@usc.edu :)
Rearranging and manipulating highly deformable bags is common in daily life, such as when we put food in grocery bags or papers in backpacks or garbage in trash bags. In contrast to rigid object manipulation, manipulating deformable objects is challenging for robots due to complex object configurations and dynamics. Furthermore, the task of manipulating highly deformable bags introduces extra complexities due to reasoning about 3-dimensional space. In this work, we consider a novel task: grasping and lifting physical bags to contain items. Using a bimanual ABB YuMi robot we test three grasping methods, where positions are determined via a human, a random baseline, and a baseline based on grasping the leftmost and rightmost points of the bag (``Maximum Width''). Across experiments where the YuMi grasps and lift bags to contain a fabric and a cable, we perform 15 trials for each method. Results demonstrate that the human has the best success rates (14/15), followed by Maximum Width (10/15) and then random (5/15).
Above, we show the pipeline we use for each trial.
Below, we show videos of 4 representative trials for each of the 3 grasping methods.
This shows a typical success case for Human Teleoperated.
This shows another success for Human Teleoperated.
This shows the only failure out of 15 trials for Human Teleoperated.
This shows a success, where the robot's gripper grips the fabric in addition to the bag.
This shows a success with Random.
This shows a failure case with Random, with both items falling out.
This shows a failure case with Random, with the fabric falling out.
This shows an interesting failure where the robot picks at the edge of the fabric.
This shows a success, though without a large bag cavity area.
This shows a success, though without a large bag cavity area.
This shows a success where the left/right parts are close to the bag opening's edges.
This shows a typical failure case for Maximum Width.