Miscellaneous


Robot becomes bank lobby manager in Shanghai

Published on Aug 28, 2015

An intelligent robot has taken a position as a bank lobby manager in Shanghai. It's able to interact with clients effectively.
 

Multi-Sensor Surface Analysis for Robotic Ironing --- ICRA2016

Published on Jan 20, 2016

The paper will be presented in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Stockholm, May 2016.
Author: Yinxiao Li, Xiuhan Hu, Danfei Xu, Yonghao Yue, Eitan Grinspun, Peter Allen (Columbia University)
Paper: "Multi-Sensor Surface Analysis for Robotic Ironing"

by Yinxiao Li, Xiuhan Hu, Danfei Xu, Yonghao Yue, Eitan Grinspun, Peter Allen
February 16, 2016)

"Multi-Sensor Surface Analysis for Robotic Ironing"

by Yinxiao Li, Xiuhan Hu, Danfei Xu, Yonghao Yue, Eitan Grinspun, Peter K. Allen
February 16, 2016

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is to iron a piece of cloth autonomously. Given a roughly flattened cloth, the goal is to have an ironing plan that can iteratively apply a regular iron to remove all the major wrinkles by a robot. We present a novel solution to analyze the cloth surface by fusing two surface scan techniques: a curvature scan and a discontinuity scan. The curvature scan can estimate the height deviation of the cloth surface, while the discontinuity scan can effectively detect sharp surface features, such as wrinkles. We use this information to detect the regions that need to be pulled and extended before ironing, and the other regions where we want to detect wrinkles and apply ironing to remove the wrinkles. We demonstrate that our hybrid scan technique is able to capture and classify wrinkles over the surface robustly. Given detected wrinkles, we enable a robot to iron them using shape features. Experimental results show that using our wrinkle analysis algorithm, our robot is able to iron the cloth surface and effectively remove the wrinkles.
 

Watch the robot iron

Published on Apr 15, 2016

Columbia University researchers used simulations, machine learning and GPUs to teach this robot how to iron. Key was making it possible for the robot to manipulate clothes and other floppy objects, a task that had long stumped them. The robot’s slow, but it can get the wrinkles out.
 
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