Planning and control for multi-robot manipulation and assembly in unstructured environments

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
While humans and other social animals (such as ants) can easily form teams to move heavy or bulky objects, robots struggle in collaborative manipulation tasks, especially under partial information about the environment or the object being transported. This thesis looks to enable flexible, scalable coordination in robot teams, looking toward a future where robots not only move objects together, but also work together to perform autonomous assembly of structures and manufactured goods. In Part I of this thesis, we investigate methods for collaborative manipulation and grasp synthesis under considerable uncertainty about the object's size and physical properties. Using tools from nonlinear control, we present a novel decentralized adaptive controller for collaborative manipulation that allows a team of robots to asymptotically track a desired trajectory in SE$(3)$. We also study the problem of synthesizing robust grasps of objects using only RGB images; we present a method which leverages a novel learned object representation to generate risk-sensitive grasps which can reason about the ambiguity inherent in the object shape. In Part II of this thesis, we turn our attention to the problem of multi-robot assembly planning. We show this problem can be posed as a mixed-integer linear program, which can be solved to global optimality using commercial solvers, and present effective heuristic strategies which can be computed quickly. Further, we present a method that uses supervised learning to accelerate the online solution of general mixed-integer convex programs using offline data. We show our method provides significant speedups over commercial solvers in a variety of robotics problems, including grasp selection and task allocation.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource
Extent 1 online resource.
Place California
Place [Stanford, California]
Publisher [Stanford University]
Copyright date 2022; ©2022
Publication date 2022; 2022
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Author Culbertson, Preston Davis
Degree supervisor Gerdes, J. Christian
Degree supervisor Schwager, Mac
Thesis advisor Gerdes, J. Christian
Thesis advisor Schwager, Mac
Thesis advisor Bohg, Jeannette, 1981-
Degree committee member Bohg, Jeannette, 1981-
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Subjects

Genre Theses
Genre Text

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Preston Culbertson.
Note Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Thesis Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022.
Location https://purl.stanford.edu/cr555rr1583

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2022 by Preston Davis Culbertson
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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