Neural Reactive Path Planning with Riemannian Motion Policies for Robotic Silicone Sealing

Peng Zhou, Pai Zheng, Jiaming Qi, Chengxi Li, Anqing Duan, Maggie Xu, Victor Wu and David Navarro-Alarcon

Submit to Elsevier

Figure: Overview of the neural path planning framework with RMPs for automatic robotic sealing. The interaction between the sealing gun and the workpiece environment is modeled with RMPs. The interaction can be attractive (yellow) or a heading correction (green).

Abstract: Due to its excellent chemical and mechanical properties, silicone sealing has been widely used in many industries. Currently, the majority of these sealing tasks are performed by human workers. Hence, they are susceptible to labor shortage problems. The use of vision-guided robotic systems is a feasible alternative to automate these types of repetitive and tedious manipulation tasks. In this paper, we present the development of a new method to automate silicone sealing with robotic manipulators. To this end, we propose a novel neural path planning framework that leverages on fractional-order differentiation for robust seam detection with vision and a Riemannian motion policy for effectively learning the manipulation of a sealing gun. Optimal control commands can be computed analytically by designing a deep neural network that predicts the acceleration and associated Riemannian metric of the sealing gun from feedback images. The performance of our new methodology is experimentally validated with a robotic platform conducting multiple silicone sealing tasks in unstructured situations. The reported results demonstrate that compared with directly predicting the control commands, our neural path planner achieves a more generalizable performance on unseen workpieces and is more robust to human/environment disturbances.

  1. Real robotic sealing results with the proposed framework on different workpieces.

1. Flat workpiece

3. Square workpiece

2. Cylinder workpiece

4. All the experimental results

2. 2D reactive path planning results with one camera under human disturbance. (intermediate resutls)

Normal robotic sealing operation on the flat workpiece (V-joint)

Robotic sealing with human disturbance on the flat workpiece (V-joint)

3. 3D reactive path planning results with the proposed framework under human disturbance.

Reactive path planning on the flat workpiece

Reactive path planning on the cylinder workpiece

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